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https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2016/12/cassandra-wilson-b-december-4-1955.html
PHOTO: CASSANDRA WILSON (b. December 4, 1955)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/cassandra-wilson-mn0000197460/biography
CASSANDRA WILSON
(b. December 4, 1955)
Artist Biography by Matt Collar
Blessed with a distinctive, flexible voice and genre-bending taste, Mississippi-born singer Cassandra Wilson is one of the best and most celebrated jazz singers of her generation. Influenced by the innovative styles of Betty Carter, Shirley Horn, and Nina Simone, Wilson emerged from Steve Coleman's M-Base Collective in the late '80s as a highly individualistic performer. Although she is an adept interpreter of the standards and blues-based jazz tradition, she's equally at home reinventing the songs of folk, pop, and country artists like Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Hank Williams, and the Beatles. It's an approach that has won her accolades, including Grammy Awards for 1995's New Moon Daughter and 2009's Loverly. Nonetheless, she remains deeply connected to her jazz roots, drawing upon influences such as Billie Holiday on her 2015 Lady Day tribute, Coming Forth by Day. Her virtuoso talents have also been utilized by her peers, including work with Dave Holland, the Roots, and Bill Frisell, as well as performing on Wynton Marsalis' Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields. Along with her Grammy Awards, Wilson has also earned a Django d'Or, an Edison Music Award, and a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1955, Wilson grew up in a musical and education-minded family, with a father who taught music and played jazz bass and a mother who taught elementary school. Encouraged to play, she started out on the piano at age six, and by age 12 had also picked up the guitar. As a teenager, she began writing her own folk-oriented songs. She played clarinet in the band and appeared in various theater productions. After high school, she attended both Millsaps College and Jackson State University, eventually graduating with a communications degree. All the while, she pursued her music interests, singing with local cover bands, performing at coffeehouses, and developing further as a jazz vocalist.
In 1981, a public affairs job at television station WDSU brought her to New Orleans. While there, she mentored with jazz elders including Ellis Marsalis, Earl Turbinton, and Alvin Batiste. Encouraged by their support, she relocated to New York City. It was during this period that she met saxophonist Steve Coleman and became the main vocalist with his innovative M-Base Collective, appearing on a handful of the group's albums. As a leader, she made her debut with 1986's Point of View, which featured Coleman, Grachan Moncur III, and other M-Base members. Several more albums followed and showcased Wilson in a similar setting.
Beginning with 1993's Blue Light 'Til Dawn, Wilson shifted her creative direction, interpreting a set of acoustic, blues-oriented songs for the Blue Note label. Included were originals alongside covers of songs by Robert Johnson, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell. The transition worked, and she found soon found herself earning critical plaudits for her stylistically adventurous work. Her follow-up album, 1995's New Moon Daughter, took home the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. Two years later, she earned yet more praise appearing on Wynton Marsalis' Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields album. There were also notable sessions with Dave Holland, the Roots, and Jacky Terrasson. In 1999, she paid tribute to one her biggest influences, trumpeter Miles Davis, with Traveling Miles.
For 2002's Belly of the Sun, Wilson continued to draw on an array of artists, covering songs by Robbie Robertson, Jimmy Webb, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and others. She also remained a fruitful composer, writing half of the songs for 2003's Glamoured. Ever willing to take new creative avenues, she deftly explored sampling and other hip-hop techniques for 2006's Thunderbird. She then returned to jazz standards for 2008's Loverly, picking up her second Grammy Award in the process. Two years later, she was back to a mix of covers and originals on Silver Pony, which also featured guest spots from Ravi Coltrane and John Legend.
Ever a musical chameleon, she changed direction again with an album of mostly original tunes entitled Another Country, which she co-produced with electric guitarist Fabrizio Sotti. Recorded in Italy, New Orleans, and New York, it was released in the summer of 2012. Wilson switched labels in 2015, signing to Sony Legacy and releasing the Billie Holiday tribute Coming Forth by Day. The album was produced by Nick Launay, who is best known for working with rock acts like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Supergrass, and Nick Cave. She stayed active over the next few years, appearing in concert with former Hothouse Flowers vocalist Liam Ó Maonlaí and touring with her own ensemble.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/cassandrawilson
Cassandra Wilson
The voice is more visual than audible; shaded, iridescent, tangible,
substantial. It seems to flow effortlessly. Read any of the dozen or so
biographies on Cassandra Wilson and you’ll discover some basics: born
and reared in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s and 70s by musician and
educator parents.
Classically trained on piano from age 6 until the age of 13, she also received further musical instruction as a clarinetist for the concert and marching bands of secondary school. During the 70s, she could be found performing Joni Mitchell songs behind an acoustic guitar, or singing with a blues band in Little Rock, Arkansas, in front of a large funk band in Jackson, or in the company of long-time friends in an all-girls ensemble. In the eighties, Cassandra moved to New Orleans where she performed with local luminaries Earl Turbinton and Ellis Marsalis. After a year, she relocated to East Orange, New Jersey where she made a decision to take her chances on the New York jazz scene. After a stint as the main vocalist with Steve Coleman’s M-Base Collective, Cassandra began recording on her own.
Her development can be tracked through her discography. From the standards on Blue Skies to the Grammy-winning projects New Moon Daughter and Loverly, to the combination of originals and interpretations played by a collection of Mississippi and New York musicians on both the 2001 release, Belly of the Sun, and 2003’s Glamoured, Cassandra continues to evolve as a vocalist, songwriter, and producer. She is a world renowned vocalist, songwriter and producer, with an extraordinary following, but at heart she is still a Mississippi girl whose art reflects her deep musical and cultural roots, anchored in the fertile Mississippi soil.
Classically trained on piano from age 6 until the age of 13, she also received further musical instruction as a clarinetist for the concert and marching bands of secondary school. During the 70s, she could be found performing Joni Mitchell songs behind an acoustic guitar, or singing with a blues band in Little Rock, Arkansas, in front of a large funk band in Jackson, or in the company of long-time friends in an all-girls ensemble. In the eighties, Cassandra moved to New Orleans where she performed with local luminaries Earl Turbinton and Ellis Marsalis. After a year, she relocated to East Orange, New Jersey where she made a decision to take her chances on the New York jazz scene. After a stint as the main vocalist with Steve Coleman’s M-Base Collective, Cassandra began recording on her own.
Her development can be tracked through her discography. From the standards on Blue Skies to the Grammy-winning projects New Moon Daughter and Loverly, to the combination of originals and interpretations played by a collection of Mississippi and New York musicians on both the 2001 release, Belly of the Sun, and 2003’s Glamoured, Cassandra continues to evolve as a vocalist, songwriter, and producer. She is a world renowned vocalist, songwriter and producer, with an extraordinary following, but at heart she is still a Mississippi girl whose art reflects her deep musical and cultural roots, anchored in the fertile Mississippi soil.
In 2012 Cassandra released “Another Country” which she produced and recorded in Italy. This album is a whole new appraoch for her and displays her in an acoustic setting featuring guitarist Fabrizio Sotti.
http://jazztimes.com/articles/16801-cassandra-wilson-golden-age
JazzTimes
Cassandra Wilson: Golden Age
“Well, first of all, Cassandra really is maybe the best singer in the world.”
This is the assessment of Joseph Henry Burnett—aka T Bone Burnett, one of the preeminent behind-the-scenes figures in American popular music—during a recent conversation about Cassandra Wilson. It’s almost the first thing he says, in fact, with the casual certainty of a man bearing witness to the truth.
Burnett is hardly a disinterested party, of course. He produced Thunderbird, Wilson’s seventh Blue Note album, and has reason to root for its success. But the man crowned producer of the year by Grammy voters a few years back (for the sleeper-hit soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?) doesn’t seem prone to hyperbole. The antithesis of a wheeler-dealer, he’s the kind of person who considers the weight of his praise.
The scales are already tipped, in this case; Wilson’s excellence as a vocalist has been well established over the last two decades, and especially during her 13-year Blue Note career. Her deep-earth contralto is difficult to describe—it’s late-morning sunlight and bittersweet molasses, or “sultry” or “sumptuous” or whatever else you’ve got—but unfailingly easy to recognize, even for the portion of the population that would be hard-pressed to put a face to her name. Five years ago, Time magazine hailed her as America’s best singer; the honor, like Burnett’s appraisal, was designed to transcend genre—which is what Wilson has been doing, more or less, since she flew onto the cultural radar.
Charting a course with her first Blue Note release, Blue Light Til Dawn, Wilson has trafficked in what one might reasonably term heartland music: blues, country, gospel, folk, acoustic pop. But context and circumstance have accurately pegged her as a jazz artist, as have the particulars of her aesthetic process. Irrevocably, indisputably, she’s one of our own. And the strength of her example has gradually altered the contours of contemporary jazz singing, in ways that some observers would decry.
Not Burnett, though. “She’s the last great jazz singer,” the producer asserts, proving that hyperbole wins a round every now and again. “I mean, maybe somebody else will come along, but as far as I see on the horizon, she’s the last real one. In a lot of ways—though I say this with some trepidation—she may be one of the greatest of all time.”
Cassandra Wilson has been spending a lot of time of late in Jackson, Miss., where she was born just over 50 years ago. It’s basically Delta country, musically sanctified soil; a few years back, Wilson recorded songs there for her last album, Glamoured. Not long before that, she rented out a train depot in Clarksdale—some three hours north on Highway 55—to lay the tracks, as it were, for her blues-enriched Belly of the Sun.
“Jackson, Mississippi,” Wilson says over the phone, savoring the cadence of the phrase. “It’s a little run-down. We got hit by Katrina, so there’s a bit of tree damage, some building damage. But we’re doing OK.” The hardy resignation in her tone seems to have as much to do with a difficult personal situation—she was caring for her ailing mother—as with the posthurricane condition of the region. Of course, hardy resignation is not so foreign a temperament in a place known as the cradle of the blues.
Another component of the blues is resilience, which happens to be a priority for Wilson at the moment. She named Thunderbird after the Native American mythological totem, a great protector often discerned in lightning patterns and rolling clouds. “I had a hard time through three-quarters of the process,” she confesses, describing the making of the album. “There were so many things that were going on in my life, so many problems I was having outside of the music. And as much as sorrow and tragedy sometimes feed your creative process, it’s really difficult if it’s happening at the same time.”
When asked about the nature of those problems, Wilson demurs—“I don’t know if I’m ready to be that honest about my life”—but she’s forthright about the effect it had on her approach to the music. “I figured there’s no reason to try to distance my emotions from what I’m doing, because that’s what I do for a living: I use my emotions in order to create my work. So I just decided to let those feelings happen. There was a lot of anxiety. There was a lot of frustration, fear, pain. You just live through the emotion, and the music then acts as a balm, in a sense. It can soothe you, it can protect you; it can allow you the space to experience those really strong emotions.”
As a working method, this sounds suspiciously like therapy. Crucially, the album doesn’t, despite the fact that within its first minute Wilson sings this stanza: “Smoke and run/Is my mission/Happiness is all I need right now.”
Smoke and run: It’s an awfully restless route to happiness, littered with outlaw intrigue and evasion. One could hardly imagine a more appropriate imperative for Wilson’s musical career.
Funny thing about outlaws: They often work in bands. Wilson may be a classic solitary type—she gives the distinct impression of someone who dwells alone with her thoughts—but musically speaking, she has forged her craft in the company of others. This, along with her abundant talent, is the reason for her reputation as a musician’s singer: She’s a musician herself, by temperament and training.
Wilson’s father, Herman B. Fowlkes, was a guitarist and bassist of regional renown. “I remember going to one particular place on Farish Street, a place he frequently worked in,” she says. “There was a certain feeling that I had there. I’m certain that’s why I became a musician: because I was exposed to all of these musicians, and this community that was really vibrant and soulful and intriguing. At that time, it was predesegregation in the South. So our lives were lived inside of that community. We really didn’t have to go outside of it for anything. So I think that the memories of that, even if I can’t really pinpoint it, it has a smell and a mood to it that I’m always trying to recapture.”
As a child, Wilson studied piano and played guitar, singing and writing songs all the while; she has reminisced about the ersatz songwriting contests staged by the kids in her neighborhood. Later, as a young woman in the thrall of Joni Mitchell, she started performing in folk settings, self-accompanied on an acoustic guitar.
The influence of her mother, Mary Fowlkes, an educator, prompted Wilson to establish something to fall back on. She studied mass communications at Jackson State University—not the worst major for a singer, in retrospect—and, in the early ’80s, moved to New Orleans to take a job as assistant public affairs director for a local television station.
Significantly, it was the musicians who pulled Wilson deeper into her art. In New Orleans, she was mentored by the saxophonist Earl Turbinton, an irrepressible figure with a handle on the intricacies of the local scene. Then, after a move to the New York area, she famously fell in with the crowd surrounding another saxophonist, Steve Coleman.
It was a time of heady ascendance for Coleman’s M-BASE Collective, which was working toward a new black music informed by sources ancient and futuristic, visceral and cerebral. Wilson became the movement’s house vocalist, appearing on Coleman’s 1985 debut, Motherland Pulse. She took a leap of her own the same year with Point of View, in the company of Coleman, trombonist Grachan Moncur III, guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Mark Johnson. For the rest of the ’80s, she created a body of work on JMT (an adventurous imprint of Polygram) that was most remarkable for her surefootedness amidst challenging musical settings. It was self-styled visionary music, experimental in aim and execution, and Wilson’s presence in it was like that of an ensemble player; she was even mixed, sonically, like a member of the band.
There was one noteworthy exception: Blue Skies, an album released in 1988 (and now available in reissued form, like most of Wilson’s JMT catalog, on the German label Winter & Winter). With crisp acoustic combo backing—Mulgrew Miller on piano, Lonnie Plaxico on bass and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums—Wilson tucked into what we’d now call the Great American Songbook, applying a cool elasticity to tunes like “Sweet Lorraine,” “I’m Old Fashioned” and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” She sounded quite a bit like her formative influence Betty Carter, a fact that delighted many more people than it dismayed. Despite limited distribution, the album was a modest hit, and Billboard named it jazz album of the year.
Wilson’s reaction to this acclaim was to withdraw, regroup and change courses; she scuttled any promise as a standard-bearer by releasing Jumpworld, an album of knotty original material conceived as a sci-fi fusion opera. Many in the jazz world saw this as self-sabotage. Some still harbor vestiges of that opinion about Wilson’s overall career.
What everyone has realized by now is that Wilson never wanted to be the prototypical jazz singer—let alone “the next Betty Carter”—although she could have made it if she had. Blue Skies is, incredibly, the only standards album in her 20-year recording career, and there’s clearly a hunger for more of its kind. In 2002, Verve issued Sings Standards, a compilation of songbook tracks scattered across her JMT releases; without fanfare or much promotion, it reached the fifth spot on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums chart.
Eclecticism, for lack of a better term, has been the predominant feature of Wilson’s Blue Note tenure from the beginning. “She had in mind to do something with her M-BASE-type band,” remembers Bruce Lundvall, Blue Note’s president and CEO. “I had sort of a disagreement with her and said, ‘Why don’t you make an acoustic record? Your downtown band is good, but we’re not looking for musical democracy; I really signed you as a solo artist and want to be able to hear you.’ I had seen her a couple nights before this meeting and didn’t feel that it was the best situation for her. She came back with Craig Street, who I didn’t even know.”
The ensuing story, though well circulated, bears repeating. “She had moved into the same building that I was living in uptown, and we ran into each other in the lobby one day,” recalls Street, whom Wilson knew as an occasional producer of live events; at the time, he was supporting himself with construction work. “She had just gotten signed to Blue Note. She said, ‘They’re looking to put me with these big-time producers,’ and it was one of those things: I just blurted out, ‘I’ll produce you.’ She went to the label and, in classic Cassandra fashion, said, ‘I’ve found the producer for my record. He’s a construction worker that lives in my building.’” Lundvall authorized a short demo recording, and on the strength of the resulting two tracks—“You Don’t Know What Love Is” and Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey”—encouraged Wilson and Street to proceed with Blue Light Til Dawn, the acoustic folk-blues-jazz mélange that would be widely hailed as a breakthrough.
Wilson was hardly the first major jazz artist of the era to look beyond standards for inspiration; Lundvall is quick to point out that Dianne Reeves, another Blue Note artist, had already incorporated elements of pop and R&B. But with Blue Light Til Dawn and its follow-up, New Moon Daughter, Wilson made bigger waves, in the jazz world and beyond. Both reached the top spot on Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart; the latter penetrated the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal performance. The press and public alike seized on the notion that jazz repertory could come from the byways of American folk music (both the rustic and confessional varieties) as well as the songbook mainstream. The power of that realization was profound enough to make it into a kind of fact; these days, it’s a given that any serious contemporary jazz singer will delve into rustic folk, world music or adult pop and soul. It’s also not so strange to hear a jazz singer backed by acoustic stringed instruments rather than piano, bass and drums.
There’s an audience for such hybrids; for proof, look no further than Blue Note’s contemporary roster. This spring the label introduced the Wood Brothers, an acoustic folk-pop project featuring bassist Chris Wood (of Medeski, Martin & Wood) and his guitar-playing brother, Oliver; last year it took on Amos Lee, a soul-inspired singer-songwriter. A few years back, it signed Keren Ann, a breathy chanteuse with a Parisian address. Just before that, of course, there was Norah Jones, whose first official release was produced in part by Street—and whose aesthetic identity is virtually unimaginable without the precedent of Wilson. “There are people out there who are sophisticated and intelligent and looking for unique artists and good music,” argues Lundvall, sounding like a man who knows.
Statistically speaking, it’s safe to say that most of those so-called sophisticated people own at least one recording produced by T Bone Burnett. The Recording Industry Association of America has certified the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack platinum seven times. Since then, Burnett has had a hand in soundtracks for Cold Mountain, A Mighty Wind, The Ladykillers and last year’s Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Then there’s his career as an album producer, which includes successful work with Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, the Wallflowers, Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss and Tony Bennett with k.d. lang. An accomplished musician in his own right, Burnett is scheduled to release a new album, The True False Identity, on Columbia in May; later that month, Columbia/Legacy is set to issue Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett.
Burnett credits hearing Wilson’s starkly harrowing version of “Strange Fruit”—the lead track from New Moon Daughter—as the moment he became a fan. He had only worked with her briefly once, on a compilation, when she came calling about Thunderbird. “I wasn’t really producing records anymore,” Burnett says. “I’m trying to get away from that bad habit. But to get a chance to work with Cassandra was irresistible.”
Thunderbird took shape gradually, over the span of quite a few months—not the usual timetable for a jazz album. The simplest explanation for this is that it’s really not a jazz album, strictly speaking; Wilson’s Blue Note releases have always warranted that disclaimer, but never as much as this one. It began with a week or so of freewheeling jam sessions at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles; later, after the results had been absorbed, there were follow-up sessions at Capitol Studios in Hollywood, among other places. (This cost a lot more to make than the typical jazz production, as Lundvall points out.)
The heart of the album is the alchemical reaction between Wilson and Burnett. “It was a little tentative at first,” ventures Burnett. “We’re both probably a little shy.” (Wilson counters: “I think that perhaps what he experienced from me was the distance, the emotional baggage that I was carrying around with me at the time.”) Over time, their rapport deepened considerably, a fact that manifests in the music. Thunderbird is expressly a Cassandra Wilson product, but it has a presence that’s flintier, weightier and clearer than her last few releases, which were all superb in stretches but a bit cloudy on the whole.
Surely this has something to do with the presence of a gifted producer, something Wilson hasn’t really had since New Moon Daughter. Street, her first producer, describes Wilson as “probably one of the most open and collaborative artists that I have ever met. And so a person like that really responds well to production.” This would seem especially true of the production style that Street owns up to borrowing from Burnett, which focuses more on creating an open atmosphere than on imposing a particular vision of order.
This is the assessment of Joseph Henry Burnett—aka T Bone Burnett, one of the preeminent behind-the-scenes figures in American popular music—during a recent conversation about Cassandra Wilson. It’s almost the first thing he says, in fact, with the casual certainty of a man bearing witness to the truth.
Burnett is hardly a disinterested party, of course. He produced Thunderbird, Wilson’s seventh Blue Note album, and has reason to root for its success. But the man crowned producer of the year by Grammy voters a few years back (for the sleeper-hit soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?) doesn’t seem prone to hyperbole. The antithesis of a wheeler-dealer, he’s the kind of person who considers the weight of his praise.
The scales are already tipped, in this case; Wilson’s excellence as a vocalist has been well established over the last two decades, and especially during her 13-year Blue Note career. Her deep-earth contralto is difficult to describe—it’s late-morning sunlight and bittersweet molasses, or “sultry” or “sumptuous” or whatever else you’ve got—but unfailingly easy to recognize, even for the portion of the population that would be hard-pressed to put a face to her name. Five years ago, Time magazine hailed her as America’s best singer; the honor, like Burnett’s appraisal, was designed to transcend genre—which is what Wilson has been doing, more or less, since she flew onto the cultural radar.
Charting a course with her first Blue Note release, Blue Light Til Dawn, Wilson has trafficked in what one might reasonably term heartland music: blues, country, gospel, folk, acoustic pop. But context and circumstance have accurately pegged her as a jazz artist, as have the particulars of her aesthetic process. Irrevocably, indisputably, she’s one of our own. And the strength of her example has gradually altered the contours of contemporary jazz singing, in ways that some observers would decry.
Not Burnett, though. “She’s the last great jazz singer,” the producer asserts, proving that hyperbole wins a round every now and again. “I mean, maybe somebody else will come along, but as far as I see on the horizon, she’s the last real one. In a lot of ways—though I say this with some trepidation—she may be one of the greatest of all time.”
Cassandra Wilson has been spending a lot of time of late in Jackson, Miss., where she was born just over 50 years ago. It’s basically Delta country, musically sanctified soil; a few years back, Wilson recorded songs there for her last album, Glamoured. Not long before that, she rented out a train depot in Clarksdale—some three hours north on Highway 55—to lay the tracks, as it were, for her blues-enriched Belly of the Sun.
“Jackson, Mississippi,” Wilson says over the phone, savoring the cadence of the phrase. “It’s a little run-down. We got hit by Katrina, so there’s a bit of tree damage, some building damage. But we’re doing OK.” The hardy resignation in her tone seems to have as much to do with a difficult personal situation—she was caring for her ailing mother—as with the posthurricane condition of the region. Of course, hardy resignation is not so foreign a temperament in a place known as the cradle of the blues.
Another component of the blues is resilience, which happens to be a priority for Wilson at the moment. She named Thunderbird after the Native American mythological totem, a great protector often discerned in lightning patterns and rolling clouds. “I had a hard time through three-quarters of the process,” she confesses, describing the making of the album. “There were so many things that were going on in my life, so many problems I was having outside of the music. And as much as sorrow and tragedy sometimes feed your creative process, it’s really difficult if it’s happening at the same time.”
When asked about the nature of those problems, Wilson demurs—“I don’t know if I’m ready to be that honest about my life”—but she’s forthright about the effect it had on her approach to the music. “I figured there’s no reason to try to distance my emotions from what I’m doing, because that’s what I do for a living: I use my emotions in order to create my work. So I just decided to let those feelings happen. There was a lot of anxiety. There was a lot of frustration, fear, pain. You just live through the emotion, and the music then acts as a balm, in a sense. It can soothe you, it can protect you; it can allow you the space to experience those really strong emotions.”
As a working method, this sounds suspiciously like therapy. Crucially, the album doesn’t, despite the fact that within its first minute Wilson sings this stanza: “Smoke and run/Is my mission/Happiness is all I need right now.”
Smoke and run: It’s an awfully restless route to happiness, littered with outlaw intrigue and evasion. One could hardly imagine a more appropriate imperative for Wilson’s musical career.
Funny thing about outlaws: They often work in bands. Wilson may be a classic solitary type—she gives the distinct impression of someone who dwells alone with her thoughts—but musically speaking, she has forged her craft in the company of others. This, along with her abundant talent, is the reason for her reputation as a musician’s singer: She’s a musician herself, by temperament and training.
Wilson’s father, Herman B. Fowlkes, was a guitarist and bassist of regional renown. “I remember going to one particular place on Farish Street, a place he frequently worked in,” she says. “There was a certain feeling that I had there. I’m certain that’s why I became a musician: because I was exposed to all of these musicians, and this community that was really vibrant and soulful and intriguing. At that time, it was predesegregation in the South. So our lives were lived inside of that community. We really didn’t have to go outside of it for anything. So I think that the memories of that, even if I can’t really pinpoint it, it has a smell and a mood to it that I’m always trying to recapture.”
As a child, Wilson studied piano and played guitar, singing and writing songs all the while; she has reminisced about the ersatz songwriting contests staged by the kids in her neighborhood. Later, as a young woman in the thrall of Joni Mitchell, she started performing in folk settings, self-accompanied on an acoustic guitar.
The influence of her mother, Mary Fowlkes, an educator, prompted Wilson to establish something to fall back on. She studied mass communications at Jackson State University—not the worst major for a singer, in retrospect—and, in the early ’80s, moved to New Orleans to take a job as assistant public affairs director for a local television station.
Significantly, it was the musicians who pulled Wilson deeper into her art. In New Orleans, she was mentored by the saxophonist Earl Turbinton, an irrepressible figure with a handle on the intricacies of the local scene. Then, after a move to the New York area, she famously fell in with the crowd surrounding another saxophonist, Steve Coleman.
It was a time of heady ascendance for Coleman’s M-BASE Collective, which was working toward a new black music informed by sources ancient and futuristic, visceral and cerebral. Wilson became the movement’s house vocalist, appearing on Coleman’s 1985 debut, Motherland Pulse. She took a leap of her own the same year with Point of View, in the company of Coleman, trombonist Grachan Moncur III, guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Mark Johnson. For the rest of the ’80s, she created a body of work on JMT (an adventurous imprint of Polygram) that was most remarkable for her surefootedness amidst challenging musical settings. It was self-styled visionary music, experimental in aim and execution, and Wilson’s presence in it was like that of an ensemble player; she was even mixed, sonically, like a member of the band.
There was one noteworthy exception: Blue Skies, an album released in 1988 (and now available in reissued form, like most of Wilson’s JMT catalog, on the German label Winter & Winter). With crisp acoustic combo backing—Mulgrew Miller on piano, Lonnie Plaxico on bass and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums—Wilson tucked into what we’d now call the Great American Songbook, applying a cool elasticity to tunes like “Sweet Lorraine,” “I’m Old Fashioned” and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” She sounded quite a bit like her formative influence Betty Carter, a fact that delighted many more people than it dismayed. Despite limited distribution, the album was a modest hit, and Billboard named it jazz album of the year.
Wilson’s reaction to this acclaim was to withdraw, regroup and change courses; she scuttled any promise as a standard-bearer by releasing Jumpworld, an album of knotty original material conceived as a sci-fi fusion opera. Many in the jazz world saw this as self-sabotage. Some still harbor vestiges of that opinion about Wilson’s overall career.
What everyone has realized by now is that Wilson never wanted to be the prototypical jazz singer—let alone “the next Betty Carter”—although she could have made it if she had. Blue Skies is, incredibly, the only standards album in her 20-year recording career, and there’s clearly a hunger for more of its kind. In 2002, Verve issued Sings Standards, a compilation of songbook tracks scattered across her JMT releases; without fanfare or much promotion, it reached the fifth spot on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums chart.
Eclecticism, for lack of a better term, has been the predominant feature of Wilson’s Blue Note tenure from the beginning. “She had in mind to do something with her M-BASE-type band,” remembers Bruce Lundvall, Blue Note’s president and CEO. “I had sort of a disagreement with her and said, ‘Why don’t you make an acoustic record? Your downtown band is good, but we’re not looking for musical democracy; I really signed you as a solo artist and want to be able to hear you.’ I had seen her a couple nights before this meeting and didn’t feel that it was the best situation for her. She came back with Craig Street, who I didn’t even know.”
The ensuing story, though well circulated, bears repeating. “She had moved into the same building that I was living in uptown, and we ran into each other in the lobby one day,” recalls Street, whom Wilson knew as an occasional producer of live events; at the time, he was supporting himself with construction work. “She had just gotten signed to Blue Note. She said, ‘They’re looking to put me with these big-time producers,’ and it was one of those things: I just blurted out, ‘I’ll produce you.’ She went to the label and, in classic Cassandra fashion, said, ‘I’ve found the producer for my record. He’s a construction worker that lives in my building.’” Lundvall authorized a short demo recording, and on the strength of the resulting two tracks—“You Don’t Know What Love Is” and Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey”—encouraged Wilson and Street to proceed with Blue Light Til Dawn, the acoustic folk-blues-jazz mélange that would be widely hailed as a breakthrough.
Wilson was hardly the first major jazz artist of the era to look beyond standards for inspiration; Lundvall is quick to point out that Dianne Reeves, another Blue Note artist, had already incorporated elements of pop and R&B. But with Blue Light Til Dawn and its follow-up, New Moon Daughter, Wilson made bigger waves, in the jazz world and beyond. Both reached the top spot on Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart; the latter penetrated the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal performance. The press and public alike seized on the notion that jazz repertory could come from the byways of American folk music (both the rustic and confessional varieties) as well as the songbook mainstream. The power of that realization was profound enough to make it into a kind of fact; these days, it’s a given that any serious contemporary jazz singer will delve into rustic folk, world music or adult pop and soul. It’s also not so strange to hear a jazz singer backed by acoustic stringed instruments rather than piano, bass and drums.
There’s an audience for such hybrids; for proof, look no further than Blue Note’s contemporary roster. This spring the label introduced the Wood Brothers, an acoustic folk-pop project featuring bassist Chris Wood (of Medeski, Martin & Wood) and his guitar-playing brother, Oliver; last year it took on Amos Lee, a soul-inspired singer-songwriter. A few years back, it signed Keren Ann, a breathy chanteuse with a Parisian address. Just before that, of course, there was Norah Jones, whose first official release was produced in part by Street—and whose aesthetic identity is virtually unimaginable without the precedent of Wilson. “There are people out there who are sophisticated and intelligent and looking for unique artists and good music,” argues Lundvall, sounding like a man who knows.
Statistically speaking, it’s safe to say that most of those so-called sophisticated people own at least one recording produced by T Bone Burnett. The Recording Industry Association of America has certified the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack platinum seven times. Since then, Burnett has had a hand in soundtracks for Cold Mountain, A Mighty Wind, The Ladykillers and last year’s Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Then there’s his career as an album producer, which includes successful work with Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, the Wallflowers, Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss and Tony Bennett with k.d. lang. An accomplished musician in his own right, Burnett is scheduled to release a new album, The True False Identity, on Columbia in May; later that month, Columbia/Legacy is set to issue Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett.
Burnett credits hearing Wilson’s starkly harrowing version of “Strange Fruit”—the lead track from New Moon Daughter—as the moment he became a fan. He had only worked with her briefly once, on a compilation, when she came calling about Thunderbird. “I wasn’t really producing records anymore,” Burnett says. “I’m trying to get away from that bad habit. But to get a chance to work with Cassandra was irresistible.”
Thunderbird took shape gradually, over the span of quite a few months—not the usual timetable for a jazz album. The simplest explanation for this is that it’s really not a jazz album, strictly speaking; Wilson’s Blue Note releases have always warranted that disclaimer, but never as much as this one. It began with a week or so of freewheeling jam sessions at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles; later, after the results had been absorbed, there were follow-up sessions at Capitol Studios in Hollywood, among other places. (This cost a lot more to make than the typical jazz production, as Lundvall points out.)
The heart of the album is the alchemical reaction between Wilson and Burnett. “It was a little tentative at first,” ventures Burnett. “We’re both probably a little shy.” (Wilson counters: “I think that perhaps what he experienced from me was the distance, the emotional baggage that I was carrying around with me at the time.”) Over time, their rapport deepened considerably, a fact that manifests in the music. Thunderbird is expressly a Cassandra Wilson product, but it has a presence that’s flintier, weightier and clearer than her last few releases, which were all superb in stretches but a bit cloudy on the whole.
Surely this has something to do with the presence of a gifted producer, something Wilson hasn’t really had since New Moon Daughter. Street, her first producer, describes Wilson as “probably one of the most open and collaborative artists that I have ever met. And so a person like that really responds well to production.” This would seem especially true of the production style that Street owns up to borrowing from Burnett, which focuses more on creating an open atmosphere than on imposing a particular vision of order.
“My philosophy as a producer is to stay out of the way as much as possible,” Burnett maintains, and to hear Wilson tell it, he did. “He was able to appear and disappear and make things happen even when he was not there,” she says. “I got a sense early on that he commanded the space in a way that was indicative of a very evolved spirit. Most producers like to be hands-on; they’re there, they’re ever-present, they’re hovering and indicating and instructing. And T Bone is just the opposite. If those qualities are there, they’re very discreet. And I always found that fascinating, that ability.”
“A lot of what I did was bring the musicians in and cast the thing in the first place,” says Burnett. Given Wilson’s history of melding with her musical environment, the significance of that simple action shouldn’t be underestimated. Whereas Wilson’s recent albums have featured versions of her working band, Thunderbird involved a different sort of crew. In addition to a few musicians known in jazz circles (Reginald Veal on acoustic bass, Gregoire Maret on harmonica and Marc Ribot on guitar), the album enlisted legendary session drummer Jim Keltner, Canadian slide guitarist Colin Linden and, more briefly, blues guitarist Keb Mo and a pair of additional drummers, Bill Maxwell and Jay Bellerose. The two most central figures were Mike Elizondo, a bassist who produced not only Fiona Apple’s bold pop album Extraordinary Machine (Columbia) but also Top 40 hip-hop singles by 50 Cent and Eve; and Keith Ciancia, aka Keefus Green, a keyboardist whose credits range from rappers Dr. Dre and Ice Cube to bluegrass heroine Alison Krauss.
By all accounts, Ciancia, who receives a coproducer credit, was the album’s most vital participant not named Cassandra Wilson. It was he who worked out many of the arrangements with Wilson, reharmonizing some songs and conjuring others from scratch. (“I hadn’t worked with her before, so I kind of just was throwing everything her way,” he says. “She’s so great at knowing what she likes and what direction she wants to go in.”) Their partnership transforms “Closer to You,” a ballad by Jakob Dylan that the Wallflowers played straight, into an intimate bedroom confessional; when Wilson begins by musing about “how soft a whisper can get,” the impulse is to lean in and find out.
Ciancia, in his other life, works closely with a very different singer, Jade Vincent, in a group called Vincent and Mr. Green. (When they began working together 14 years ago, the first song she asked him to learn was “Whirlwind Soldier,” from Wilson’s Jumpworld.) Vincent and Mr. Green’s self-titled debut, released a couple years ago on the underground rock label Ipecac, showcases Ciancia’s knack for ambient unrest and dark gothic fury. Remarkably, it’s not a stretch to detect flashes of that ethos at certain points on Thunderbird; listen to a track like “Daddy,” by Vincent and Mr. Green, and then consult “Poet,” a song composed by Wilson with Ciancia. The latter track involves far less psychosis, but its sonic signature is more or less the same. (Lyrically, the song offers a sensuous counterpoint to “Closer to You,” with the soft whisper replaced by something “between a scream and a shout.” You get the picture.)
Thunderbird offers other rewards, some of them more recognizably Wilsonian. The traditional Western ballad “Red River Valley” receives a poignant reading, with Linden’s guitar providing the only accompaniment; similar duet chemistry distinguishes Burnett’s Tin Pan Alley-esque “Lost,” with Ribot applying his unmistakable style. “I Want to Be Loved,” the Willie Dixon classic best known in renditions by Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones, draws back to an unhurried gait, with Wilson sounding both playful and languid. The sound of her voice is always gripping, even when it’s multitracked in the background—something that hasn’t appeared often in her oeuvre.
One of the album’s transcendent moments is a version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Easy Rider” that begins in haunting quietude and then slowly, in almost imperceptible stages, awakens. Roughly two minutes in—just in time for the refrain “There’s gonna be a time when a woman don’t need no man”—the ensemble hits, like a blinding blast of daylight. It’s the blues, but not the rustic variety that Wilson has always favored. And it’s not quite an electric roadhouse romp, either. Something about it suggests the humid sound of Bob Dylan’s recent, sublime albums Love and Theft and Time Out of Mind (Columbia), a point of reference one imagines Wilson wouldn’t disown.
Regarding an appraisal of the album as jazz, Wilson doesn’t have much to say that she hasn’t already illustrated in song. But Burnett ventures a thought. “There are better and worse songs that come out of each period,” he says. “Some will wash down into the sand and some will stay at the tip of the pyramid. A singer of Cassandra’s caliber should be able to sing any kind of song that touches her, and that she can touch. And then it becomes what it is she does. And I think it would loosely become ‘jazz’—in the old, coarse sense of the word.”
Nevertheless, Thunderbird enters the world as a pop product, and it will be judged and tested accordingly. There are at least two songs on the album that have a chance at “penetrating the zeitgeist,” to use a phrase of Burnett’s. The first is “Go to Mexico,” a catchy electroacoustic groove tune loosely built on the album’s only sample, a recording of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indian tribe. The second is “It Would Be So Easy,” which isn’t hard to imagine in a luxury car commercial or on a fashion runway.
Tellingly, both of those songs are credited to Wilson, Ciancia and Elizondo. (Engineer Mike Piersante, an unsung hero of the album, also gets a credit on the latter of the two.) In other words, the best candidates for a pop single on Thunderbird were the products, originally, of spontaneous collective efforts. This says a lot about Wilson, but nothing her fans don’t already know.
Whether a broader audience will embrace the album is the question of the hour. Certainly there would be a kind of cosmic justice if it won over a sizeable portion of the millions who fell in love with Norah Jones. “Nothing would make me happier than for Cassandra Wilson to have a hit single,” says Burnett, who’s placing his bets on an edit of “Go to Mexico.” He adds: “She should be held in the highest esteem by our culture, and I don’t think people know about her yet. She should be up where Ella Fitzgerald was.”
Street doesn’t see why that couldn’t happen. “It just seems like a no-brainer: T Bone and Cassandra together. It’s like: Go sell a couple million records. Why wouldn’t you?” Lundvall, both predisposed and conditioned to taking a more cautious view about the album’s success, divulges that Blue Note has plans to “market the hell out of it.”
In February, a full two months before the album’s release, Ciancia was awakened by “Go to Mexico” on his clock radio, which was tuned to the Los Angeles station KCRW. At first he thought it was a dream.
The only person who professes not to be thinking about the album's commericail potential is Wilson, and that's entirely characteristic. “I didn’t get into this because I wanted to sell a lot of records or become a pop star,” she says. “I would have taken a totally different route. People say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if this song was played on the radio?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, it would be nice, but it’s OK if it’s not.’ Then they look at me strangely, like they think that maybe there’s something wrong with an artist not having that kind of ambition. But I’ve always been really honest about that. I’m not doing this for that. If it happens, then it’s great. It’s lagniappe; it’s icing. But if it doesn’t, I’m still really excited about what I do.”
The language is revealing: Wilson is nothing if not fascinated by the pure process of making music; “what I do” rather than what it brings. And in this regard, Thunderbird—with its new working methods, new cadre of collaborators and undeniably new sound—would seem a fortunate occurrence.
And a well-timed one; even, to borrow her words, a balm. This is never more palpable than on “Tarot,” which closes the album on Wilson’s acoustic guitar playing within a delicately balanced full ensemble. Amid a dreamlike wash of instruments, she strikes a ruminative tone:
I went to the tarot woman yesterday
She looked at my cards and told me what they say
In your future I see fortune and dreams fulfilled
But you are such a restless soul
And you always will
(Fold on hearts)
There’s no way to deny it
I can see in your eyes the loneliness
(Raise on kings)
You’ve been searching forever
For a lover that suits you the best
The melancholy in these lines, tempered by the sweetness of that contralto, dissolves as the chorus tumbles into view. “Don’t give up,” Wilson sings self-imploringly. “Don’t walk away. You’re just a little bit closer/than you were yesterday.”
Wilsonian Doctrine
Wilson's impact on jazz and popular singing is immeasurable; consider the musical variety represented in the following list, an admittedly impressionistic rundown of 10 recnet albums that bear traces (sometimes subtle) of her influence.
India.Arie, India.Arie’s Song (Motown)
The singer-songwriter traffics in organic R&B (erstwhile neosoul), but she has often expressed her deep admiration for Wilson, who repaid the favor by including Arie on Belly of the Sun. The affinities are most obvious during Arie’s warm and transfixing live performances and on her 2001 debut, Acoustic Soul (Motown); but there are moments on this new release, a two-disc volume, that also justify the comparison.
Ann Dyer, When I Close My Eyes (Sunnyside)
Dyer, an expressive Bay Area vocalist, named her 1990s band No Good Time Fairies, after the Steve Coleman song heard on Wilson’s first album. The exploratory element of Wilson’s legacy clearly appeals most to Dyer, but so does the notion of a wide-open repertoire: Years ago, Dyer offered a radical revision of the Beatles’ Revolver, and this most recent release includes a take on Björk’s “Bachelorette.”
Norah Jones, Feels Like Home (Blue Note)
Who? Just kidding. No one would mistake Jones’ gently rootsy cosmopolitanism for Wilson’s more elemental fare, but the lineage, at least, is clear. (Street had a hand in producing Come Away With Me, her multi-platinum debut.) Conspiracy alert: Olu Dara has guest appeared on several of Wilson’s albums, and Daru Oda is a background singer on this sophomore Jones release. Coincidence? Surely not!
Sonya Kitchell, Words Came Back to Me (Velour)
This teenage singer-songwriter doesn’t bring Wilson to mind musically; she’s more strictly a Northeastern folkie. But her precocious acoustic-pop debut, which Starbucks has been plugging hard, is clearly aimed at a post-Norah world, which in turn is a post-Cassandra one. Got that?
Maroon, Who the Sky Betrays (Head Fulla Brains)
Hillary Maroon has cited Wilson as an influence, and it would seem that, like Dyer, she means the Wilson of M-BASE pedigree; the second release from this Brooklyn-based group deliberately leans to the experimental side. Repertory-stretching bonus: renditions of Radiohead’s “The Tourist” and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
Rebecca Martin, People Behave Like Ballads (MaxJazz)
Martin plays guitar and mandolin and engages with top-shelf jazz musicians in an acoustic folk-rock vein. Her connection to Wilson is loose and perhaps a touch indirect: through the common prism of 1970s-era Joni Mitchell.
Raul Midón, State of Mind (Manhattan)
Cassandra is hardly the first influence you think of here—that would be Stevie Wonder, who helpfully makes a guest appearance—but Midón’s high-flying musicianship and acoustic lyricism are points of connection. His best song, “All in Your Mind,” isn’t hard to picture on a Wilson set list.
Gretchen Parlato, Gretchen Parlato (Available at cdbaby.com)
A graduate of the Thelonious Monk Institute and winner of the 2004 Monk Competition, Parlato has all the makings of jazz ascendancy. What she shares with Wilson isn’t a sound so much as a member-of-the-band ethos; she has held her own with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, and her rapport with the acoustic guitarist Lionel Loueke is very nearly profound.
Rhonda Richmond, Oshogbo Town (Ojah)
Richmond, who appeared on Belly of the Sun, is one of Wilson’s childhood friends and still a kindred spirit; in February, they performed together on a concert in Jackson that Richmond produced. This 2003 album teases out connections between African folk forms and Southern blues and soul; Richmond’s alto isn’t quite the gold mine that Wilson’s is, but it’s not such a far cry, either.
Lizz Wright, Dreaming Wide Awake (Verve)
It’s all here: the Southern roots, the rich alto, the rustic acoustic sound, even the hand of Craig Street. Dig her rendition of Neil Young’s “Old Man” for a spine-tingling resonance. Happily, Wright has proven her independence as a young artist; she may be a daughter of Cassandra, but she’s not afraid of that fact, and her own distinct identity never fails to emerge.
Originally published in May 2006
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/talk-to-al-jazeera/articles/2016/1/29/cassandra-wilson.html
The Grammy Award–winning jazz vocalist incorporates blues, country and folk into her songs
Randall Pinkston: Let's talk about home, Mississippi. What kind of musical influences did you have when you were growing up?
Cassandra Wilson: So many. The home was filled with instruments because my father was a musician. And he had this huge jazz collection. I listened to everything from Miles Davis to Hank Williams, because my mother loved country.
But I understand that your family did not listen to the blues.
Not a lot. There was not a lot of traditional Delta blues. I don't think there was any, actually, to be honest with you.
Why was that?
Well, my father had this idea about the blues being — how did he put it? It was a rather common form of music. He was a great proponent of jazz because it's a very complex form. And you have to be extremely —
Sophisticated?
Sophisticated, exactly. And that's true. That's the word. So he didn't have any blues except for jazz blues, you know, by Cannonball Adderley or that kind of Chicago-style jazz blues.
Your house was filled with instruments.
Yes.
What did your dad play, by the way?
He started off on the violin when he was very young in Chicago. Then he picked up the trumpet and played in the Army band during World War II. And then he went from the — let me get this straight — he went from the trumpet to the guitar. That was the first instrument I remember him playing when I was young. And then he went from the guitar to the bass. And he played bass. Most people know him as a bassist in Jackson.
Which instrument did you pick up first?
First instrument I didn't pick. I actually — you can't pick up a piano.
Oh, OK.
The piano was my first instrument because I went to someone's house with my parents. And they had a piano. I just fell in love with it. My mother tells me the story that I started playing on the piano instantly. I was about 3 or 4 years old.
So at what point did you pick up the guitar?
I was about 12 years old.
Did you know at that time that you wanted to become a musician?
I think at that time, I knew. I felt as if I were a musician already.
Were you singing then, at age 12?
Yes. I started to write. Not sing so much, you know, as I can't describe it. I call them little songs.
‘I
went to someone’s house with my parents. And they had a piano. I just
fell in love with it. My mother tells me the story that I started
playing on the piano instantly. I was about 3 or 4 years old.
‘I went to someone’s house with my parents. And they had a piano. I just fell in love with it. My mother tells me the story that I started playing on the piano instantly. I was about 3 or 4 years old.’
--Cassandra Wilson
I think it's a little bit of both. I think you have to have a desire to a unique voice in order to have one. But everyone comes into the world with their unique voice. The question is, do you know how to develop it? And it takes a lot of work to do that. And there are a lot of influences that you have to allow in. But then you craft your singular voice based on all of those influences but not imitating — which I don't know if that makes sense.
Tell me about some of the influences.
Wow, there's so many influences. The very first influences were — it was actually an instrumentalist, Miles Davis. I heard "Sketches of Spain" when it came out. I was maybe about 6 years old. I believe it was released in 1960. So I was in between 5 and 6 years old. And that was the music that just really expanded my consciousness. If you can imagine listening to that kind of music and just going, "Wow, what is that?"
And later you did an album.
A tribute to Miles Davis.
I know probably every song on that album is your favorite. But do you have one that you always try to include in your performances?
"Run the Voodoo Down" … it's a very strong piece that arose from that project. That piece lingers.
I know Abbey Lincoln was a strong influence. What did you glean from her?
Well, Abbey Lincoln was one of the most creative lyricists, and she had a way of telling a story through a song that I think is very reminiscent of Billie Holiday. She could go right to the heart with her voice. I learned a lot about just taking off all of the frou-frou — I call it frou-frou — and just focusing in on what do you need to say with one or two notes that is going to penetrate.
When you talk about frou-frou with respect to music, what do you mean?
I mean showing off your agility. Showing off your chops. Singing something for the sake of showing that you can do it.
As opposed to?
Singing it from the heart. Telling a story and singing it from the heart.
And that's what you like about Billie Holiday?
Yes.
Your most recent release is a tribute to her. "Coming Forth by Day." Talk to me about Billie Holiday's legacy and why you decided to focus on her.
There's a wonderful article that I read, and it's called "The Hunting of Billie Holiday." There's so much about her life that we don't know. It's all shrouded in all of this salaciousness. It's all about her addiction or the men that she was with or whatever. But they don't really focus very much on her artistry. It's as if she was some sort of primitive creature who suddenly was able to sing the way that she did. Like she had this natural instinct for the music. She was much more than that. She was a great musician. She was a incredible interpreter of stories. When Billie Holiday sings it, it's about telling your husband or your lover that no matter what happens, I'm going to be here for him.
And you don't have to explain whatever you're doing.
And you don't have to explain. When I sing it, it's more — I do a little twist on the lyric and say that "You don't have to explain. But if I catch you doin' it again, there's hell to pay." There's a little — I did a little twist there.
So you changed the lyrics?
Slightly … In the lyric that Billie sings, you get the sense that she's the victim. In the lyric that I sing, I'm not the victim.
You're laying down the law.
I'm laying down the law.
"Strange Fruit." As we know, it's a song that is connected to a horrible legacy in America of black men being lynched, hung on trees publicly for people to see. Many people would like to believe that that's a part of our past. But you say?
I say it's very much a part of our present. The racism is subtle now. It's not as obvious. Then again, there's some places where it is quite obvious. We're seeing the rash of young men that are taken out, killed in the streets. We still have to wrestle with the problems that we have here in America with racism. Really, I don't think that much has changed.
So when you're selecting the music that you're going to perform, are you doing it in part because of its social meaning as well as what it represents for you musically?
Oh, yeah. I think that enters into it. Because you can't separate what it represents musically from what it represents socially. They kind of blend together, in my mind, in the way that I absorb music. I don't separate the music from the content.
You've also been described as someone who has been a peacemaker between jazz and other genres. In this particular quote they were talking about rock. The writer called you a "genre-bending jazz diva." What do you think about that as a description of your approach to music?
I love the idea of bending things, bending reality. That's always fascinating to me. I don't know if I care for the word "diva."
I saw "Death Letter," and I'm thinking, "What is this about?" Then I was listening, and there was this really awesome polyrhythmic thing going. Then you started singing the song, about someone who had died. And this is something that I've read, that you find a connection to your dad? Now, explain that, please, how a song titled "Death Letter," about a cooling board at a morgue, connects you to your father.
Because the emotion that you tap into, you remember. The cooling board is where the body cools. I remember when my father passed away. He was at Collins Funeral Home.
On Sarah Street in Jackson.
Yes. I had to go down and look at him before they could sign off. They wanted it to be as close to how he looked in life. So someone from the family … has to come down. The memories of that I use when I sing "Death Letter" because it's a very strong memory that I have of touching his face and crying.
And connecting to our ancestors. And for you, respect for ancestors, reverence for ancestry also informs your music.
Absolutely. Every day. It does.
We mentioned earlier your tribute to Miles Davis, "Traveling Miles." You did "New Moon Daughter," "Blue Light 'til Dawn," a few of the albums. I'm wondering, is there a sequence to the albums and the songs you choose?
When you're in the middle of making an album, you don't know what you're doing. I'm speaking for myself. There's a lot of leeway that I allow in the process for the musicians and for myself, for the music to create itself.
So you're not thinking so much about a sequence. You're thinking about moods, shifting moods, shifting from one mood to another. One day you may do one song. So when you get some distance from the project, then you're able to weave together a little story sometimes. And that's how you sequence it, based on the story that you're able to get, you're able to glean from the work.
I was astounded at the number of musicians who were born in or grew up in Mississippi. Not only B.B. King and Elvis Presley and Muddy Waters, but Britney Spears. Not just Robert Johnson but Faith Hill, Leontyne Price. Freddie Waits, the drummer, and Dick Griffin, trombonist. Jimmy Buffett, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Brandy, LeAnn Rimes. And Cassandra Wilson.
It's the water, I guess. I don't know.
What is it about Mississippi, you think, that generates such musicality?
Mississippi is a strange place. We're at the bottom, at the very bottom in so many ways. Metaphorically, physically, we're at the very bottom. I think that you have to develop a certain kind of curiosity, eccentricity. There's a certain creativity, I think, you develop as a result of all of the pressure that there is in being and living in Mississippi.
If you ever write a book or someone asks you, "What is your legacy as a musician?" how would you describe Cassandra Wilson's legacy to music?
I love what you said earlier about being a peacemaker. I think that's a very part of who I am and what I do, is bringing disparate elements together and realizing common ground. I think it's important to do that musically. I think it's important for us to do that in the world. I want to be remembered for doing that. I also want to be remembered for the spirituality. Tapping into a spirituality inside of the music is very important.
And I understand you also are teaching the next generation with workshops.
We have begun to do workshops at the Yellow Scarf in Jackson, Mississippi. We take on young people who are interested in music, teach them a little bit about the business. It's not just about learning how to work with the notes and the tones. It's also about learning how to carry yourself in the marketplace.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
http://jazztimes.com/articles/19895-cassandra-wilson-the-new-standard
JazzTimes
Along with Wilson’s new repertoire came a new way of singing. Notes were no longer flung like dishes; they were kneaded and stretched as if they were still wet clay. Instead of singing like a piano, she sang more like an organ, trading in the usual percussive attack for a more sustained, rounded approach to each note.
On Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move” from Belly of the Sun, for example, she pulls and twists at the line endings. “You may be high,” she sings, and the “high” slides up and over an extra beat. “You may be low,” she adds, and the “low” tumbles off a cliff. “You may be down,” she sympathizes, “no place to go,” and the “go” is held until a hint of despair creeps in. “But when the Lord”—the single syllable of “Lord” marches in on two notes like a monarch—“gets ready”—“ready” falls down like a judge’s gavel—“you gotta move”—and the “move” trails off like a train disappearing down the track.
There were two main sources for Wilson’s new vocal style. One was in the Mississippi Delta, where singers like Robert Johnson, Son House and Muddy Waters had blurred the boundaries between singing, the moaning of despair and the moaning of orgasm. The other was postwar New York, where Billie Holiday and Miles Davis gave birth to a cool alternative to hot bebop.
“What I’m doing is more a Billie way of singing,” Wilson explains. “Billie was so different from Ella and Sarah. It was not based on dexterity so much as on the roundness of her tone, the color inside the voice. And how much of her life is in that? When you concentrate on singing really fast or imitating horns, the tone becomes less important. But when you take time to sing the song; you have to leave spaces in it.
“Those spaces invite an audience into the sound you’re creating. Being a Southerner, I’m probably predisposed to that slower, thicker sort of sound; that ‘built for comfort not for speed’ kind of thing. I’m taking what Billie did and using it to create longer lines where I can sail on what the rhythm section is doing. I want the option of locking in with them on certain passages and floating above them on others; that way I can create tension and release it.
“And, of course, when I went back to the blues in Mississippi, that changed how I sing. I think a lot of jazz musicians are afraid of the blues, because there’s a certain emotional vulnerability when you get into this material. It’s so bare that you really have to be inventive; you can’t rely on the usual jazz vocabulary of quoting melodies and running scales and going, ‘scooby-dooby-doo.’ That’s why a lot of jazz musicians feel safer keeping an academic distance from the blues.
“I’ve done a lot of jerky singing in the past,” she adds, “but now I’m hearing something different. It has something to do with the fact that I’ve been listening to Miles Davis so much over the past few years. I feel the need to stretch things out more and savor a note, especially if it’s a good note that’s really singing with the other instruments. It’s not always the same note every night, but when I hear a note really ringing, I hold on to it and let it enjoy a long decay.”
The longer Wilson held out those notes and savored their lingering overtones, the more she found herself fighting against musicians who wanted to cover up every vacant space. She had a special problem with drummers, whose splashy cymbals ate up a lot of sonic territory. She didn’t know what to do until producer Craig Street came to the rescue.
“Craig taught me something very important about drums,” she acknowledges. “I’d always assumed that you had to work with a regular drum kit. But on Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter, I realized that I could hear more of the overtones and undertones of my voice if I didn’t have the kit. What was getting in the way was not the drumheads but the cymbals. It’s easier for a horn player to work with cymbals, because a horn has a narrower aural focus and can cut through. But the human voice is multitimbral, and all those other tones get lost in a wash of cymbals—especially my voice, which is a contralto and in the same range. Even the snare and the hi-hat get in the way. And these young drummers are trying so hard to sound like Tony Williams and Elvin Jones that they don’t know how to use brushes or mallets, how to work with a singer. There’s something about the way they’re constantly pushing the tempo with the ride cymbal that gets on my nerves.
“When I got rid of the kit and started using hand drums, it led to different patterns. The conga player states the main rhythmic pulse, but the percussionist doesn’t play the same thing; he plays something complementary. So you have that push and pull without all that cymbal noise. When we’re working out arrangements, if I hear something I can’t float over, we rework it so there’s enough space for my voice. And these different drum patterns led us to Brazilian music.”
The new album features Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March” and James Taylor’s “Only a Dream in Rio,” and it was scheduled to include Caetano Veloso’s “Little Lion” until the song was pulled from the disc at the last minute. With two hand drummers and two guitarists, Wilson’s band is well designed for this repertoire and she skips through it with a lilting finesse. She sang all three songs at the Blue Note, and when she delivered Jobim’s line about “the joy in your heart,” she leaned out over the stage edge as if to press the point home.
“I’ve always loved Brazilian music,” she says. “There’s a natural connection between bossa nova and jazz—they both come from Afro-European cultures; they both emphasize rhythm and rely on improvisation.”
But the exotic land that had the biggest influence on Belly in the Sun was her native Mississippi. Wilson was born there in Jackson 46 years ago, the daughter of Herman Fowlkes, a postman, and Mary Fowlkes, a teacher. They lived in the city, but their next-door neighbor had chickens in the yard, and Wilson’s grandmother went into the woods behind their house every day to gather herbs for cooking and healing.
“I only came inside to sleep, eat and change my clothes,” the former tomboy remembers. “There was a closeness to nature that we as African-Americans have lost. We have become dangerously urbanized. This environment is not healthy for anybody, but especially for us, because we can’t escape as easily as a lot of white people who can jump in the car and go visit grandma. Our children are surrounded by concrete, when nature should be the first instructor for the young.”
Wilson was a maverick even as a teenager. Instead of going to predominantly black Jackson State College, she went to the city’s predominantly white Millsaps College “to investigate white people and study their habits, almost like a National Geographic expedition.” She studied Camus and Hegel in the classroom and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan back in the dorm.
She dropped out of Millsaps in 1975, moved to Little Rock to front a blues-rock band, returned to Jackson in 1978, enrolled in Jackson State and graduated in 1980. During her second fling at college, she formed a folk band called Past, Present & Future. Drawing inspiration from Mitchell, Dylan, Nina Simone and Richie Havens, the quartet featured Wilson on acoustic guitar and vocals, Rhonda Richmond on violin and keyboards, Niecie Evers (Medgar’s niece) on congas, and Nellie McInnis on bass. Even today she thinks of Jackson as “home.”
“By the end of 1999,” Wilson says, “I was exhausted. I had done four albums since 1993, each followed by a long tour and one led right into the next. So I needed to take some time off, and I went home to get my bearings. I always go home when I want to gather the information I need to move forward. It’s such a different pace from here in New York; you have time for long conversations over big meals. The lifestyle is so gracious that it gives you time to reflect.
“The other thing I like about Mississippi is that I’m nobody down there. We always joke that Michael Jackson could walk down the street in Jackson and people would go, ‘Oh, that’s Michael Jackson,’ and keep on walking. People there are not easily impressed. So when people spend time with you, you know it’s because of you and not because of what you do.”
As the Christmas holidays of 1999 spilled over into 2000, Wilson reconnected with the members of her college folk band. The returning prodigal daughter was so impressed with the songs Richmond was writing and singing that Wilson decided to help her former bandmate make a record.
Wilson set up shop at a Jackson studio as Richmond recorded six of her own compositions plus songs by Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Muddy Waters. Not only did Wilson produce and sing harmony on the album, Oshogbo Town, but she also formed Ojah Records to put it out last year. (It can be ordered from Wilson’s Web site, www.jazztrance.com.)
“I don’t own any of my own masters,” Wilson laments, “and ownership is so important in this business. So I wanted to start a company where I could own something. By keeping the overhead low, I can make a profit without having to sell a lot of copies. I like the idea of keeping it small.
“I haven’t signed anyone else yet, but I’m looking at some people. I want to document some of the great musicians in Mississippi who choose never to leave. I know it contradicts the stereotype, but life is so seductive down there that if people can play music and support themselves, they never want to leave.”
After recording Richmond early in 2000 and making the rounds of the jazz-festival circuit that summer, Wilson overhauled her band in the fall. Lonnie Plaxico, her bassist and musical director since 1993, was ready to be a bandleader in his own right. When he left, he took pianist George Colligan and drummer Lionel Cordew with him.
Wilson held on to guitarist Marvin Sewell and percussionist Jeffrey Haynes and decided to return to her twin-guitar, twin-percussion lineup of the mid-’90s. So she brought guitarist Kevin Breit, percussionist Cyro Baptista and bassist Mark Peterson—all of whom had worked on New Moon Daughter—back into the band, not only for the recording sessions but also for the live shows.
“A lot of times the label wants you to use famous names in the studio,” she says, “and then save money on the road by hiring younger, unknown guys. But it breaks up the continuity if you don’t use your studio band on the road. It’s more work because you have to teach the new people the songs, and then it doesn’t sound the same anyway. I’m fortunate because I don’t get that kind of pressure from Blue Note.”
As she considered how to best use this new band, Wilson remembered how much she had enjoyed working in Mississippi on Richmond’s album. But for Belly of the Sun she wanted to get out of Jackson and up into the heart of the Delta. There are no state-of-the-art studios in that northwest corner of the state, so she decided to record in the old Clarksdale train depot, the same spot where so many sharecroppers bought a one-way ticket for Chicago in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Her engineer, Danny Kopelson, set up a mobile recording truck outside, and Wilson went to work.
“I wanted to get my musicians out of New York,” she explains. “I wanted to take them down to Mississippi and show them the ‘crossroads.’ These are such great musicians that I knew they could play anywhere; the important thing was that they absorb the emotion of where I come from, that they put the rhythm of Clarksdale into their music. I don’t think the record would have sounded the same if we hadn’t gone down there.”
While she was down there, Wilson discovered Abie “Boogaloo” Ames, a member of the Charles Brown/Champion Jack Dupree schools of mid-century jazz-blues piano. Ames, who died earlier this year at 81, joins Wilson for an unaccompanied voice-and-piano version of “Darkness on the Delta.” If it sounds like two utterly relaxed people sitting side-by-side on the piano bench, just fooling around, that’s because it is.
More local talent got involved when Wilson recorded one of Richmond’s songs, “Road So Clear”; the composer played piano and Mississippian Olu Dara played trumpet, the only trace of a horn on the whole disc. And when the band got kicked out of the depot to accommodate a previously scheduled wedding reception, Wilson dragged everyone into a nearby boxcar for echo-heavy treatments of “You Gotta Move” and Robert Johnson’s “Hot Tamales.”
Last fall, Wilson found herself back in New York in her new neighborhood of Tribeca. After years of living in Harlem, she had moved downtown to experience a different slice of New York culture—and to enjoy better take-out delivery, she adds. On the morning of Sept. 11, however, her manager Michael Simanga called her and told her to look outside her window.
“I looked out,” she recalls, “and there were all these businessmen walking and running, which is something you never see on my street. So I turned on the TV and saw what they were running from—the World Trade Center, only eight blocks away. It was like being in a really bad movie; it was terrifying and exciting at the same time. The whole city had been brought to its knees.
“As Americans, we always feel that we’re secure, that someone was taking care of the bad guys before they got to us. That day we all felt absolutely vulnerable. And out of that vulnerability came some amazing displays of humanity. Something strange kicked in for me, and I decided not to move. I felt a protectiveness for my new ’hood. This was my home now, and I didn’t want to run away from home.”
Out of those experiences came a new song, “Just Another Parade.” “Yesterday’s news,” Wilson wrote over a skipping acoustic-guitar melody, “is tomorrow’s blues, but today I am alive/Today I did much more than survive.” As soon as she wrote it, she knew it was the song she had been seeking for her scheduled duet with new folk-soul star India.Arie. They quickly cut it in New York and added it to Belly of the Sun.
Arie is just one of the young female singers, along with Jill Scott, Norah Jones, Patricia Barber and others, who seem to be taking their cue from Wilson’s unorthodox approach to repertoire, songwriting, arrangement and delivery. These fellow travelers suggest that Wilson is not merely blazing a divergent path for herself but may be launching a whole new subgenre.
“Today you have a lot of strong, self-reliant women in the music,” Wilson argues, “and you can’t expect them to keep singing the songbook of the ’30s and ’40s. Those lyrics may have been appropriate for their time, but I was always taught that jazz was all about being in the moment. It has always been important to me to be relevant to my own time, to express my own feelings.
“When you canonize a certain group of songs and a certain way of singing, you don’t give the singer enough room to change. And if a musician can’t experiment and improvise, how can this be jazz? Someone has to push the boundaries of the music forward. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Originally published in May 2002
JazzTimes
Cassandra Wilson: The New Standard
2
Cassandra Wilson
by Jimmy Katz
When Cassandra Wilson played New York City’s Blue Note in
February, a lot was riding on her week of shows. She was introducing a
new album, Belly of the Sun (Blue Note), her first in three years, and a
new band, her first in nine years without music director Lonnie
Plaxico. And she was pushing her unorthodox approach even further, a
style that had won an enthusiastic audience but had divided jazz critics
between those who hailed her as a leading innovator and those who
dismissed her as a crossover compromiser.
Wilson looked fabulous as she took the stage opening night. She wore a rumpled blue shirt over a black-velvet blouse and black high-heel boots; her almond-frosted dreadlocks were bundled in the back and spilled down her neck. She peered at the audience from under her heavy-lidded eyes and cracked one of her signature half-smiles as if she had just heard a juicy bit of gossip about each and every one of us.
There were no keyboards, horns or trap drums on stage; two hand drummers, two guitarists and a bassist flanked Wilson. The band stirred up a groove that didn’t snap, crackle and pop with big accents like your usual jazz combo; instead the rhythms rippled in overlapping patterns of small accents as if the music were coming from Brazil, Haiti or Louisiana rather than New York, Chicago or L.A.
When Wilson started singing, she didn’t lock into those undulating beats; rather she held out her smoky contralto in long, drawn-out syllables that created a dramatic tension against the jittery pulse. The words she sang, “I pulled into Nazareth/I was feeling about half-past dead,” were instantly familiar but not from any jazz book.
These are the opening lines from the folk-rock classic “The Weight,” introduced by the Band and remade so memorably by Aretha Franklin. But no one had ever sung it like this—with a Brazilian-Caribbean beat and a slow-blues vocal as thick as Mississippi mud.
Right there, in the opening moments of the show, was all the evidence one needed to argue for Wilson as a major jazz innovator. She has completely revamped jazz singing—the book, the beat, the very sound of the voice.
When Wilson first emerged in the late ’80s, jazz vocals had been stuck in a time warp. The template of repertoire, rhythm and delivery defined by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan in the ’40s had remained near constant while everything else in jazz was changing around it. Even Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln, two of Wilson’s biggest heroes, refined that template without fundamentally altering it.
Wilson has changed it all, and she’s continuing to shake things up with her new CD. Belly of the Sun begins with “The Weight” and proceeds to feature tunes by Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bob Dylan and Wilson herself. It prominently features such unlikely jazz instruments as mandolin, banjo, bouzouki and resonator guitar; no horn is heard until the 12th track. And the tension between the purring, moaning vocals and the rippling hand drums is sharper than ever.
“I don’t think you have to have a piano trio for it to be jazz,” Wilson insists. “We’ve heard that ride cymbal doing that 4/4 thing so much that we’ve come to believe that that is jazz. I don’t believe it. Jazz is not a certain repertoire or instrumentation; it’s about being truly in the moment and being able to improvise, being able to swing and drawing on the blues. We do all those things.”
It’s 11:30 a.m.—early morning by the jazz clock—the day before her Blue Note opening, and Wilson is seated in the corner booth of Dylan Prime, a restaurant that’s just a short stroll from her Tribeca apartment. Wearing a black turtleneck and dangling orange-bead earrings, she leans over a steaming mug of tea and ponders each question with the same patience she brings to her singing. When she grabs hold of an idea, she draws it out the way she does a note.
“Some people want to lock jazz up in an ivory tower where there’s no place to breathe or grow,” she complains. “If the music has to be a certain way, if you have to do Cole Porter and Irving Berlin tunes, you’re just recycling the same music over and over again.
“When people say, ‘The new pop songs aren’t as good as the old pop songs,’ I say, ‘Listen again.’ It’s just ridiculous to think that good songwriting ended in the ’50s. We’re in 2002, and you’re telling me no one has written a good melody and good lyrics in 50 years? It’s so liberating to look outside the traditional jazz book for material.”
No singer has been more aggressive or consistent in expanding the jazz book than Wilson. When she moved to New Jersey in 1982, she started gigging as a jazz singer in nearby Manhattan. One night she sang “Cherokee” at a jazz-club tribute to Charlie Parker, and afterward the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman came over and struck up a conversation.
“He told me bebop is important,” Wilson recounts, “but he said it was even more important that I create my own music and my own style. He said I’d never be noticed if I kept doing that same repertoire and that same style from another era; so many singers were doing those same Tin Pan Alley tunes.”
It was a life-changing conversation, and Wilson began to hang out with Coleman and friends like Greg Osby, Geri Allen, Lonnie Plaxico and Jean-Paul Bourelly, who made up Brooklyn’s M-Base movement. Unlike so many singers who combined jazz and R&B by simplifying everything, Wilson combined the two genres by complicating everything—keeping the funky beats and the altered chords, the gospel wail and the improvised scatting. And she started to write original material, either by herself or with Coleman, Bourelly and her band.
“I had never heard of a female jazz vocalist other than Abbey Lincoln writing her own material,” Wilson says. “The more songwriting I did, the more I loved it. You’re able to create a vehicle specifically for your own voice, specifically for your own experiences. Not that you can’t express your experiences through other people’s material, but with your own songs less tailoring is required.”
Wilson recorded six M-Base-dominated albums for JMT Records and a one-off project for DIW/Columbia, but in 1993 she signed with Blue Note and decided it was time for a major overhaul of her music. She hired a new band and found a new producer, Craig Street, who helped her find her way back home to the music of her youth.
“Craig did this Freudian thing,” she recalls, “and had me lie on a couch as he asked me questions about how I felt about the music I had grown up with. I told him about playing Joni Mitchell songs on guitar while I was in college in Mississippi and said, ‘But how am I going to be a jazz vocalist and do the folk thing?’ He said, ‘Why not? It’s who you are.’ So I decided to come out of the closet.”
On the two albums that Street produced, 1993’s Blue Light ’Til Dawn and 1995’s New Moon Daughter, Wilson tackled songs by Mitchell, Van Morrison, U2, Hank Williams, Neil Young, the Monkees, the Stylistics, Ann Peebles, Robert Johnson and Son House, and she made them all sound comfortable in a jazz setting.
On her frequent guest appearances during the ’90s, Wilson sang Muddy Waters with Javon Jackson, the Zombies with Kurt Elling, the Temptations with Regina Carter, Elvis Costello with Bill Frisell, Prince and the Beatles with Bob Belden, Aretha Franklin with David Sanborn, Afro-pop with Angélique Kidjo and hip-hop with the Roots.
“I think these songs stand up musically,” Wilson argues. “Joni Mitchell writes great melodies and great chord changes. She writes very freely, maybe because she’s unschooled, and the things she does with guitar tunings have always fascinated me. And the language that she and Bob Dylan use is so powerful. Their lyrics are connected to folk, the common folk, whereas Cole Porter and Harold Arlen are more connected to the wealthy, the bon vivant. Dylan, Mitchell and Robbie Robertson [of the Band] are writing for the disaffected, discontented and disenfranchised; they’re saying, ‘Hey, it’s not perfect down here; we have some demons to deal with.’
“And the blues—it used to be that jazz artists prided themselves on knowing the blues. But how many young jazz musicians are willing to transcribe Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson the way they transcribe Bird or Trane? You can’t tell me that this music is too common or too easy. Those songs are bottomless.
“And don’t talk to me about sophisticated harmonies; you can always change the chords. That’s what I do—I’m a jazz musician; I live for chord substitutions. If Ella Fitzgerald could turn a nursery rhyme like “A Tisket a Tasket” into a jazz song, what can’t we use?
“Have you ever heard the original version of ‘Green Dolphin Street’? It’s your standard movie theme song, but someone said, ‘I can change these chords and make it interesting.’ That’s what John Coltrane did with ‘My Favorite Things.’ He said, ‘I like this melody, but I’ll put a minor feel in there and an Indian raga, then I’ll hold that pedal point forever.’”
Wilson looked fabulous as she took the stage opening night. She wore a rumpled blue shirt over a black-velvet blouse and black high-heel boots; her almond-frosted dreadlocks were bundled in the back and spilled down her neck. She peered at the audience from under her heavy-lidded eyes and cracked one of her signature half-smiles as if she had just heard a juicy bit of gossip about each and every one of us.
There were no keyboards, horns or trap drums on stage; two hand drummers, two guitarists and a bassist flanked Wilson. The band stirred up a groove that didn’t snap, crackle and pop with big accents like your usual jazz combo; instead the rhythms rippled in overlapping patterns of small accents as if the music were coming from Brazil, Haiti or Louisiana rather than New York, Chicago or L.A.
When Wilson started singing, she didn’t lock into those undulating beats; rather she held out her smoky contralto in long, drawn-out syllables that created a dramatic tension against the jittery pulse. The words she sang, “I pulled into Nazareth/I was feeling about half-past dead,” were instantly familiar but not from any jazz book.
These are the opening lines from the folk-rock classic “The Weight,” introduced by the Band and remade so memorably by Aretha Franklin. But no one had ever sung it like this—with a Brazilian-Caribbean beat and a slow-blues vocal as thick as Mississippi mud.
Right there, in the opening moments of the show, was all the evidence one needed to argue for Wilson as a major jazz innovator. She has completely revamped jazz singing—the book, the beat, the very sound of the voice.
When Wilson first emerged in the late ’80s, jazz vocals had been stuck in a time warp. The template of repertoire, rhythm and delivery defined by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan in the ’40s had remained near constant while everything else in jazz was changing around it. Even Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln, two of Wilson’s biggest heroes, refined that template without fundamentally altering it.
Wilson has changed it all, and she’s continuing to shake things up with her new CD. Belly of the Sun begins with “The Weight” and proceeds to feature tunes by Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bob Dylan and Wilson herself. It prominently features such unlikely jazz instruments as mandolin, banjo, bouzouki and resonator guitar; no horn is heard until the 12th track. And the tension between the purring, moaning vocals and the rippling hand drums is sharper than ever.
“I don’t think you have to have a piano trio for it to be jazz,” Wilson insists. “We’ve heard that ride cymbal doing that 4/4 thing so much that we’ve come to believe that that is jazz. I don’t believe it. Jazz is not a certain repertoire or instrumentation; it’s about being truly in the moment and being able to improvise, being able to swing and drawing on the blues. We do all those things.”
It’s 11:30 a.m.—early morning by the jazz clock—the day before her Blue Note opening, and Wilson is seated in the corner booth of Dylan Prime, a restaurant that’s just a short stroll from her Tribeca apartment. Wearing a black turtleneck and dangling orange-bead earrings, she leans over a steaming mug of tea and ponders each question with the same patience she brings to her singing. When she grabs hold of an idea, she draws it out the way she does a note.
“Some people want to lock jazz up in an ivory tower where there’s no place to breathe or grow,” she complains. “If the music has to be a certain way, if you have to do Cole Porter and Irving Berlin tunes, you’re just recycling the same music over and over again.
“When people say, ‘The new pop songs aren’t as good as the old pop songs,’ I say, ‘Listen again.’ It’s just ridiculous to think that good songwriting ended in the ’50s. We’re in 2002, and you’re telling me no one has written a good melody and good lyrics in 50 years? It’s so liberating to look outside the traditional jazz book for material.”
No singer has been more aggressive or consistent in expanding the jazz book than Wilson. When she moved to New Jersey in 1982, she started gigging as a jazz singer in nearby Manhattan. One night she sang “Cherokee” at a jazz-club tribute to Charlie Parker, and afterward the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman came over and struck up a conversation.
“He told me bebop is important,” Wilson recounts, “but he said it was even more important that I create my own music and my own style. He said I’d never be noticed if I kept doing that same repertoire and that same style from another era; so many singers were doing those same Tin Pan Alley tunes.”
It was a life-changing conversation, and Wilson began to hang out with Coleman and friends like Greg Osby, Geri Allen, Lonnie Plaxico and Jean-Paul Bourelly, who made up Brooklyn’s M-Base movement. Unlike so many singers who combined jazz and R&B by simplifying everything, Wilson combined the two genres by complicating everything—keeping the funky beats and the altered chords, the gospel wail and the improvised scatting. And she started to write original material, either by herself or with Coleman, Bourelly and her band.
“I had never heard of a female jazz vocalist other than Abbey Lincoln writing her own material,” Wilson says. “The more songwriting I did, the more I loved it. You’re able to create a vehicle specifically for your own voice, specifically for your own experiences. Not that you can’t express your experiences through other people’s material, but with your own songs less tailoring is required.”
Wilson recorded six M-Base-dominated albums for JMT Records and a one-off project for DIW/Columbia, but in 1993 she signed with Blue Note and decided it was time for a major overhaul of her music. She hired a new band and found a new producer, Craig Street, who helped her find her way back home to the music of her youth.
“Craig did this Freudian thing,” she recalls, “and had me lie on a couch as he asked me questions about how I felt about the music I had grown up with. I told him about playing Joni Mitchell songs on guitar while I was in college in Mississippi and said, ‘But how am I going to be a jazz vocalist and do the folk thing?’ He said, ‘Why not? It’s who you are.’ So I decided to come out of the closet.”
On the two albums that Street produced, 1993’s Blue Light ’Til Dawn and 1995’s New Moon Daughter, Wilson tackled songs by Mitchell, Van Morrison, U2, Hank Williams, Neil Young, the Monkees, the Stylistics, Ann Peebles, Robert Johnson and Son House, and she made them all sound comfortable in a jazz setting.
On her frequent guest appearances during the ’90s, Wilson sang Muddy Waters with Javon Jackson, the Zombies with Kurt Elling, the Temptations with Regina Carter, Elvis Costello with Bill Frisell, Prince and the Beatles with Bob Belden, Aretha Franklin with David Sanborn, Afro-pop with Angélique Kidjo and hip-hop with the Roots.
“I think these songs stand up musically,” Wilson argues. “Joni Mitchell writes great melodies and great chord changes. She writes very freely, maybe because she’s unschooled, and the things she does with guitar tunings have always fascinated me. And the language that she and Bob Dylan use is so powerful. Their lyrics are connected to folk, the common folk, whereas Cole Porter and Harold Arlen are more connected to the wealthy, the bon vivant. Dylan, Mitchell and Robbie Robertson [of the Band] are writing for the disaffected, discontented and disenfranchised; they’re saying, ‘Hey, it’s not perfect down here; we have some demons to deal with.’
“And the blues—it used to be that jazz artists prided themselves on knowing the blues. But how many young jazz musicians are willing to transcribe Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson the way they transcribe Bird or Trane? You can’t tell me that this music is too common or too easy. Those songs are bottomless.
“And don’t talk to me about sophisticated harmonies; you can always change the chords. That’s what I do—I’m a jazz musician; I live for chord substitutions. If Ella Fitzgerald could turn a nursery rhyme like “A Tisket a Tasket” into a jazz song, what can’t we use?
“Have you ever heard the original version of ‘Green Dolphin Street’? It’s your standard movie theme song, but someone said, ‘I can change these chords and make it interesting.’ That’s what John Coltrane did with ‘My Favorite Things.’ He said, ‘I like this melody, but I’ll put a minor feel in there and an Indian raga, then I’ll hold that pedal point forever.’”
Along with Wilson’s new repertoire came a new way of singing. Notes were no longer flung like dishes; they were kneaded and stretched as if they were still wet clay. Instead of singing like a piano, she sang more like an organ, trading in the usual percussive attack for a more sustained, rounded approach to each note.
On Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move” from Belly of the Sun, for example, she pulls and twists at the line endings. “You may be high,” she sings, and the “high” slides up and over an extra beat. “You may be low,” she adds, and the “low” tumbles off a cliff. “You may be down,” she sympathizes, “no place to go,” and the “go” is held until a hint of despair creeps in. “But when the Lord”—the single syllable of “Lord” marches in on two notes like a monarch—“gets ready”—“ready” falls down like a judge’s gavel—“you gotta move”—and the “move” trails off like a train disappearing down the track.
There were two main sources for Wilson’s new vocal style. One was in the Mississippi Delta, where singers like Robert Johnson, Son House and Muddy Waters had blurred the boundaries between singing, the moaning of despair and the moaning of orgasm. The other was postwar New York, where Billie Holiday and Miles Davis gave birth to a cool alternative to hot bebop.
“What I’m doing is more a Billie way of singing,” Wilson explains. “Billie was so different from Ella and Sarah. It was not based on dexterity so much as on the roundness of her tone, the color inside the voice. And how much of her life is in that? When you concentrate on singing really fast or imitating horns, the tone becomes less important. But when you take time to sing the song; you have to leave spaces in it.
“Those spaces invite an audience into the sound you’re creating. Being a Southerner, I’m probably predisposed to that slower, thicker sort of sound; that ‘built for comfort not for speed’ kind of thing. I’m taking what Billie did and using it to create longer lines where I can sail on what the rhythm section is doing. I want the option of locking in with them on certain passages and floating above them on others; that way I can create tension and release it.
“And, of course, when I went back to the blues in Mississippi, that changed how I sing. I think a lot of jazz musicians are afraid of the blues, because there’s a certain emotional vulnerability when you get into this material. It’s so bare that you really have to be inventive; you can’t rely on the usual jazz vocabulary of quoting melodies and running scales and going, ‘scooby-dooby-doo.’ That’s why a lot of jazz musicians feel safer keeping an academic distance from the blues.
“I’ve done a lot of jerky singing in the past,” she adds, “but now I’m hearing something different. It has something to do with the fact that I’ve been listening to Miles Davis so much over the past few years. I feel the need to stretch things out more and savor a note, especially if it’s a good note that’s really singing with the other instruments. It’s not always the same note every night, but when I hear a note really ringing, I hold on to it and let it enjoy a long decay.”
The longer Wilson held out those notes and savored their lingering overtones, the more she found herself fighting against musicians who wanted to cover up every vacant space. She had a special problem with drummers, whose splashy cymbals ate up a lot of sonic territory. She didn’t know what to do until producer Craig Street came to the rescue.
“Craig taught me something very important about drums,” she acknowledges. “I’d always assumed that you had to work with a regular drum kit. But on Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter, I realized that I could hear more of the overtones and undertones of my voice if I didn’t have the kit. What was getting in the way was not the drumheads but the cymbals. It’s easier for a horn player to work with cymbals, because a horn has a narrower aural focus and can cut through. But the human voice is multitimbral, and all those other tones get lost in a wash of cymbals—especially my voice, which is a contralto and in the same range. Even the snare and the hi-hat get in the way. And these young drummers are trying so hard to sound like Tony Williams and Elvin Jones that they don’t know how to use brushes or mallets, how to work with a singer. There’s something about the way they’re constantly pushing the tempo with the ride cymbal that gets on my nerves.
“When I got rid of the kit and started using hand drums, it led to different patterns. The conga player states the main rhythmic pulse, but the percussionist doesn’t play the same thing; he plays something complementary. So you have that push and pull without all that cymbal noise. When we’re working out arrangements, if I hear something I can’t float over, we rework it so there’s enough space for my voice. And these different drum patterns led us to Brazilian music.”
The new album features Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March” and James Taylor’s “Only a Dream in Rio,” and it was scheduled to include Caetano Veloso’s “Little Lion” until the song was pulled from the disc at the last minute. With two hand drummers and two guitarists, Wilson’s band is well designed for this repertoire and she skips through it with a lilting finesse. She sang all three songs at the Blue Note, and when she delivered Jobim’s line about “the joy in your heart,” she leaned out over the stage edge as if to press the point home.
“I’ve always loved Brazilian music,” she says. “There’s a natural connection between bossa nova and jazz—they both come from Afro-European cultures; they both emphasize rhythm and rely on improvisation.”
But the exotic land that had the biggest influence on Belly in the Sun was her native Mississippi. Wilson was born there in Jackson 46 years ago, the daughter of Herman Fowlkes, a postman, and Mary Fowlkes, a teacher. They lived in the city, but their next-door neighbor had chickens in the yard, and Wilson’s grandmother went into the woods behind their house every day to gather herbs for cooking and healing.
“I only came inside to sleep, eat and change my clothes,” the former tomboy remembers. “There was a closeness to nature that we as African-Americans have lost. We have become dangerously urbanized. This environment is not healthy for anybody, but especially for us, because we can’t escape as easily as a lot of white people who can jump in the car and go visit grandma. Our children are surrounded by concrete, when nature should be the first instructor for the young.”
Wilson was a maverick even as a teenager. Instead of going to predominantly black Jackson State College, she went to the city’s predominantly white Millsaps College “to investigate white people and study their habits, almost like a National Geographic expedition.” She studied Camus and Hegel in the classroom and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan back in the dorm.
She dropped out of Millsaps in 1975, moved to Little Rock to front a blues-rock band, returned to Jackson in 1978, enrolled in Jackson State and graduated in 1980. During her second fling at college, she formed a folk band called Past, Present & Future. Drawing inspiration from Mitchell, Dylan, Nina Simone and Richie Havens, the quartet featured Wilson on acoustic guitar and vocals, Rhonda Richmond on violin and keyboards, Niecie Evers (Medgar’s niece) on congas, and Nellie McInnis on bass. Even today she thinks of Jackson as “home.”
“By the end of 1999,” Wilson says, “I was exhausted. I had done four albums since 1993, each followed by a long tour and one led right into the next. So I needed to take some time off, and I went home to get my bearings. I always go home when I want to gather the information I need to move forward. It’s such a different pace from here in New York; you have time for long conversations over big meals. The lifestyle is so gracious that it gives you time to reflect.
“The other thing I like about Mississippi is that I’m nobody down there. We always joke that Michael Jackson could walk down the street in Jackson and people would go, ‘Oh, that’s Michael Jackson,’ and keep on walking. People there are not easily impressed. So when people spend time with you, you know it’s because of you and not because of what you do.”
As the Christmas holidays of 1999 spilled over into 2000, Wilson reconnected with the members of her college folk band. The returning prodigal daughter was so impressed with the songs Richmond was writing and singing that Wilson decided to help her former bandmate make a record.
Wilson set up shop at a Jackson studio as Richmond recorded six of her own compositions plus songs by Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Muddy Waters. Not only did Wilson produce and sing harmony on the album, Oshogbo Town, but she also formed Ojah Records to put it out last year. (It can be ordered from Wilson’s Web site, www.jazztrance.com.)
“I don’t own any of my own masters,” Wilson laments, “and ownership is so important in this business. So I wanted to start a company where I could own something. By keeping the overhead low, I can make a profit without having to sell a lot of copies. I like the idea of keeping it small.
“I haven’t signed anyone else yet, but I’m looking at some people. I want to document some of the great musicians in Mississippi who choose never to leave. I know it contradicts the stereotype, but life is so seductive down there that if people can play music and support themselves, they never want to leave.”
After recording Richmond early in 2000 and making the rounds of the jazz-festival circuit that summer, Wilson overhauled her band in the fall. Lonnie Plaxico, her bassist and musical director since 1993, was ready to be a bandleader in his own right. When he left, he took pianist George Colligan and drummer Lionel Cordew with him.
Wilson held on to guitarist Marvin Sewell and percussionist Jeffrey Haynes and decided to return to her twin-guitar, twin-percussion lineup of the mid-’90s. So she brought guitarist Kevin Breit, percussionist Cyro Baptista and bassist Mark Peterson—all of whom had worked on New Moon Daughter—back into the band, not only for the recording sessions but also for the live shows.
“A lot of times the label wants you to use famous names in the studio,” she says, “and then save money on the road by hiring younger, unknown guys. But it breaks up the continuity if you don’t use your studio band on the road. It’s more work because you have to teach the new people the songs, and then it doesn’t sound the same anyway. I’m fortunate because I don’t get that kind of pressure from Blue Note.”
As she considered how to best use this new band, Wilson remembered how much she had enjoyed working in Mississippi on Richmond’s album. But for Belly of the Sun she wanted to get out of Jackson and up into the heart of the Delta. There are no state-of-the-art studios in that northwest corner of the state, so she decided to record in the old Clarksdale train depot, the same spot where so many sharecroppers bought a one-way ticket for Chicago in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Her engineer, Danny Kopelson, set up a mobile recording truck outside, and Wilson went to work.
“I wanted to get my musicians out of New York,” she explains. “I wanted to take them down to Mississippi and show them the ‘crossroads.’ These are such great musicians that I knew they could play anywhere; the important thing was that they absorb the emotion of where I come from, that they put the rhythm of Clarksdale into their music. I don’t think the record would have sounded the same if we hadn’t gone down there.”
While she was down there, Wilson discovered Abie “Boogaloo” Ames, a member of the Charles Brown/Champion Jack Dupree schools of mid-century jazz-blues piano. Ames, who died earlier this year at 81, joins Wilson for an unaccompanied voice-and-piano version of “Darkness on the Delta.” If it sounds like two utterly relaxed people sitting side-by-side on the piano bench, just fooling around, that’s because it is.
More local talent got involved when Wilson recorded one of Richmond’s songs, “Road So Clear”; the composer played piano and Mississippian Olu Dara played trumpet, the only trace of a horn on the whole disc. And when the band got kicked out of the depot to accommodate a previously scheduled wedding reception, Wilson dragged everyone into a nearby boxcar for echo-heavy treatments of “You Gotta Move” and Robert Johnson’s “Hot Tamales.”
Last fall, Wilson found herself back in New York in her new neighborhood of Tribeca. After years of living in Harlem, she had moved downtown to experience a different slice of New York culture—and to enjoy better take-out delivery, she adds. On the morning of Sept. 11, however, her manager Michael Simanga called her and told her to look outside her window.
“I looked out,” she recalls, “and there were all these businessmen walking and running, which is something you never see on my street. So I turned on the TV and saw what they were running from—the World Trade Center, only eight blocks away. It was like being in a really bad movie; it was terrifying and exciting at the same time. The whole city had been brought to its knees.
“As Americans, we always feel that we’re secure, that someone was taking care of the bad guys before they got to us. That day we all felt absolutely vulnerable. And out of that vulnerability came some amazing displays of humanity. Something strange kicked in for me, and I decided not to move. I felt a protectiveness for my new ’hood. This was my home now, and I didn’t want to run away from home.”
Out of those experiences came a new song, “Just Another Parade.” “Yesterday’s news,” Wilson wrote over a skipping acoustic-guitar melody, “is tomorrow’s blues, but today I am alive/Today I did much more than survive.” As soon as she wrote it, she knew it was the song she had been seeking for her scheduled duet with new folk-soul star India.Arie. They quickly cut it in New York and added it to Belly of the Sun.
Arie is just one of the young female singers, along with Jill Scott, Norah Jones, Patricia Barber and others, who seem to be taking their cue from Wilson’s unorthodox approach to repertoire, songwriting, arrangement and delivery. These fellow travelers suggest that Wilson is not merely blazing a divergent path for herself but may be launching a whole new subgenre.
“Today you have a lot of strong, self-reliant women in the music,” Wilson argues, “and you can’t expect them to keep singing the songbook of the ’30s and ’40s. Those lyrics may have been appropriate for their time, but I was always taught that jazz was all about being in the moment. It has always been important to me to be relevant to my own time, to express my own feelings.
“When you canonize a certain group of songs and a certain way of singing, you don’t give the singer enough room to change. And if a musician can’t experiment and improvise, how can this be jazz? Someone has to push the boundaries of the music forward. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Originally published in May 2002
http://jazztimes.com/articles/138274-cassandra-wilson-dawn-of-light
JazzTimes
Cassandra Wilson: Dawn of Light
On the 20th anniversary of "Blue Light 'Til Dawn"
Released in the fall of 1993, Cassandra Wilson’s recently reissued Blue Note debut, Blue Light ’Til Dawn, made
her a jazz superstar and marked a paradigm shift in vocal-jazz
repertory. Essential to its success was Blue Note’s then-president Bruce
Lundvall, whose reputation for generosity and facilitating creativity
seemed to flout every known negative stereotype about record executives.
In this excerpt from his new Lundvall biography, Playing by Ear (ArtistShare), Dan Ouellette details Wilson’s historic ascent at Blue Note.
One afternoon in the fall of 2012, Bruce Lundvall heads up to the SiriusXM satellite jazz radio studio at Columbus Circle, housed next door to the Jazz at Lincoln Center performing venues, to host his weekly Blue Note Records hour with Sirius Real Jazz program director Mark Ruffin.
As he has done for dozens of these radio sessions, Lundvall tells stories and Ruffin cues up tracks. It’s an essential Blue Note primer. Today, new Blue Note president Don Was and senior vice president/general manager Hank Forsyth are sitting in with the chairman emeritus as he talks the talk about a few of the myriad signings he’s been responsible for in the last two decades.
Part of today’s focus is on Cassandra Wilson. Mark plays her rendering of “Time After Time” (the Cyndi Lauper hit pop song that was a concert staple of Miles Davis’ in the last decade of his life) from Wilson’s 1999 Blue Note album, Traveling Miles—her tribute to the music of Miles.
Lundvall is thrilled to hear that unmistakable dark-roasted contralto voice and her impeccable lyrical sensibility with her singular drawn-out syllables and bending pitches.
While Lundvall signed many important jazz musicians during the ’90s, one of the most extraordinary artists he brought to Blue Note was Wilson. She had already recorded seven albums for Polydor’s Munich-based JMT label (including 1988’s luscious Blue Skies, a collection of straight-up jazz standards) as well as an electric album for DIW/Columbia in 1993, Dance to the Drums Again. But she was not feeling entirely fulfilled as an artist.
Wilson began her jazz singing odyssey in the mid-’80s working with saxophonist Steve Coleman’s adventurous M-Base Collective (she was one of the founding members) and launching her solo career by recording two albums of funky, electric music, 1986’s Point of View and 1987’s Days Aweigh. “I learned how to mine different kinds of repertoire and to peel apart the structures within songs to understand them,” she told me a decade ago about her M-Base days. “But the whole thrust of that movement was to incorporate the music of our day, to make it personal.”
Although she continued to record her own solo albums, Wilson also performed and recorded with Coleman and fellow M-Baser Greg Osby, while taking to the road with Henry Threadgill.
Influenced by both Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, Wilson set off to develop her voice. Even though she didn’t want to imitate Carter, she admits that she was following in her footsteps a little too closely. Carter, interviewed by DownBeat, was asked about the up-and-comer. “Betty said she’s all right,” Wilson says, “but she’s got to find her voice. And she was absolutely right.”
At a live DownBeat Blindfold Test at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2008, Wilson commented on the song “In the Still of the Night” that Carter recorded on her 1992 album, It’s Not About the Melody: “You don’t hear singers today doing what she’s doing rhythmically. She’s focused squarely on delivering some of the most amazing, swinging shapes and forms that a vocalist to date has done. And her pitch is what I describe as a moveable pitch. She’s not trying to hit the center of a note, and sometimes she just slides right into it or goes around it.”
Wilson said that it wasn’t only the music but the pioneering way she led her own band: “She was in the trenches with the musicians. Most of the time you see a singer in front of a trio or quartet and not enjoying being with the musicians supporting her. But Betty was one of the first singers I saw who was a musician onstage. She was having conversations with everyone in the group. That turned me on to jazz.”
But Wilson knew she needed to move beyond the Betty zone. Coleman gave her similar sage advice, agreeing that finding her voice was Wilson’s Holy Grail. “I studied bebop seriously to where I was transcribing Charlie Parker solos and digging deep into the history and the lore,” she says. “So I thought it natural to follow Betty—Betty ‘Bebop’ Carter—but Steve convinced me that that wasn’t an option. He said that all the singers were doing the same thing, singing the standards, and that I’d never be able to sing them the way they did. So, find your own voice.”
Freed from that looming presence, Wilson found that she also began to “grow tired of all the music around me. So much was happening in terms of instrumentation, and at that point in my career, I wanted to hear my voice with less instrumentation.”
One afternoon in the fall of 2012, Bruce Lundvall heads up to the SiriusXM satellite jazz radio studio at Columbus Circle, housed next door to the Jazz at Lincoln Center performing venues, to host his weekly Blue Note Records hour with Sirius Real Jazz program director Mark Ruffin.
As he has done for dozens of these radio sessions, Lundvall tells stories and Ruffin cues up tracks. It’s an essential Blue Note primer. Today, new Blue Note president Don Was and senior vice president/general manager Hank Forsyth are sitting in with the chairman emeritus as he talks the talk about a few of the myriad signings he’s been responsible for in the last two decades.
Part of today’s focus is on Cassandra Wilson. Mark plays her rendering of “Time After Time” (the Cyndi Lauper hit pop song that was a concert staple of Miles Davis’ in the last decade of his life) from Wilson’s 1999 Blue Note album, Traveling Miles—her tribute to the music of Miles.
Lundvall is thrilled to hear that unmistakable dark-roasted contralto voice and her impeccable lyrical sensibility with her singular drawn-out syllables and bending pitches.
While Lundvall signed many important jazz musicians during the ’90s, one of the most extraordinary artists he brought to Blue Note was Wilson. She had already recorded seven albums for Polydor’s Munich-based JMT label (including 1988’s luscious Blue Skies, a collection of straight-up jazz standards) as well as an electric album for DIW/Columbia in 1993, Dance to the Drums Again. But she was not feeling entirely fulfilled as an artist.
Wilson began her jazz singing odyssey in the mid-’80s working with saxophonist Steve Coleman’s adventurous M-Base Collective (she was one of the founding members) and launching her solo career by recording two albums of funky, electric music, 1986’s Point of View and 1987’s Days Aweigh. “I learned how to mine different kinds of repertoire and to peel apart the structures within songs to understand them,” she told me a decade ago about her M-Base days. “But the whole thrust of that movement was to incorporate the music of our day, to make it personal.”
Although she continued to record her own solo albums, Wilson also performed and recorded with Coleman and fellow M-Baser Greg Osby, while taking to the road with Henry Threadgill.
Influenced by both Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, Wilson set off to develop her voice. Even though she didn’t want to imitate Carter, she admits that she was following in her footsteps a little too closely. Carter, interviewed by DownBeat, was asked about the up-and-comer. “Betty said she’s all right,” Wilson says, “but she’s got to find her voice. And she was absolutely right.”
At a live DownBeat Blindfold Test at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2008, Wilson commented on the song “In the Still of the Night” that Carter recorded on her 1992 album, It’s Not About the Melody: “You don’t hear singers today doing what she’s doing rhythmically. She’s focused squarely on delivering some of the most amazing, swinging shapes and forms that a vocalist to date has done. And her pitch is what I describe as a moveable pitch. She’s not trying to hit the center of a note, and sometimes she just slides right into it or goes around it.”
Wilson said that it wasn’t only the music but the pioneering way she led her own band: “She was in the trenches with the musicians. Most of the time you see a singer in front of a trio or quartet and not enjoying being with the musicians supporting her. But Betty was one of the first singers I saw who was a musician onstage. She was having conversations with everyone in the group. That turned me on to jazz.”
But Wilson knew she needed to move beyond the Betty zone. Coleman gave her similar sage advice, agreeing that finding her voice was Wilson’s Holy Grail. “I studied bebop seriously to where I was transcribing Charlie Parker solos and digging deep into the history and the lore,” she says. “So I thought it natural to follow Betty—Betty ‘Bebop’ Carter—but Steve convinced me that that wasn’t an option. He said that all the singers were doing the same thing, singing the standards, and that I’d never be able to sing them the way they did. So, find your own voice.”
Freed from that looming presence, Wilson found that she also began to “grow tired of all the music around me. So much was happening in terms of instrumentation, and at that point in my career, I wanted to hear my voice with less instrumentation.”
Originally published in September 2014
Music Interviews
Cassandra Wilson 'Couldn't Wait' To Reinvent The Billie Holiday Songbook
Cassandra Wilson's Billie Holiday tribute album is titled Coming Forth By Day.Mark Seliger/Courtesy of the artist
Vocalist Billie Holiday was born 100 years ago this week. Today, her place in music history is clear.
"I think we witness in Billie Holiday's music the beginning of the jazz vocal age, really," fellow vocalist Cassandra Wilson says. "Her phrasing is very conversational, and it swings — it moves with the musicians. She's very much in charge of her place in the music. She's in control of the story, and in control of her cadence."
"I think we witness in Billie Holiday's music the beginning of the jazz vocal age, really," fellow vocalist Cassandra Wilson says. "Her phrasing is very conversational, and it swings — it moves with the musicians. She's very much in charge of her place in the music. She's in control of the story, and in control of her cadence."
Wilson — one of the premier jazz singers of her own age — is about to release a tribute album to Holiday, titled Coming Forth By Day.
But as she says in an interview with NPR's Arun Rath, she aspired to
much more than re-creating the original iconic recordings.
"I couldn't wait to get inside of this material and spruce it up, reinvent it, do some wild and crazy things to it," Wilson says. "I'm in that line of singers that really mine the emotional content of a song. You steer clear of the cliches and go straight for the heart of the song.
"It's beyond improper — it's considered rude, in jazz, to imitate someone. So for me to do a tribute to Billie Holiday and imitate her style or her context would be almost insulting."
For example, Wilson's take on "Don't Explain," a song Holiday wrote about a cheating lover, comes from an empowered perspective.
"It's a different version, because it takes more of a womanist reading," Wilson says. "The reading is not so much, 'I'm the victim,' or 'You cheated on me.' It's more of a sense of, 'You may be doing something, but it needs to stop right now.'"
"I couldn't wait to get inside of this material and spruce it up, reinvent it, do some wild and crazy things to it," Wilson says. "I'm in that line of singers that really mine the emotional content of a song. You steer clear of the cliches and go straight for the heart of the song.
"It's beyond improper — it's considered rude, in jazz, to imitate someone. So for me to do a tribute to Billie Holiday and imitate her style or her context would be almost insulting."
For example, Wilson's take on "Don't Explain," a song Holiday wrote about a cheating lover, comes from an empowered perspective.
"It's a different version, because it takes more of a womanist reading," Wilson says. "The reading is not so much, 'I'm the victim,' or 'You cheated on me.' It's more of a sense of, 'You may be doing something, but it needs to stop right now.'"
Wilson also takes on "Strange Fruit," a protest against racism —
specifically, the lynching of African-Americans. Her version takes on
renewed purpose in light of the recent high-profile police killings of
unarmed black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement which rose in
their wake.
"When I sing this song, it sounds more like there's a chorus, in terms of the musicians who join me," Wilson says. "And it is more emphatic, because it's ridiculous that we would still be dealing with these issues in 2015."
Wilson did contribute one original song, which she calls "Last Song (For Lester)." Holiday and tenor saxophonist Lester Young were the closest of collaborators — "musical soulmates," Wilson says — who had a falling out. When Holiday first learned of Young's death, Holiday immediately flew back to the U.S. from London to be at the funeral, where she expected to be able to sing for her dear friend. When she was barred from performing, she was devastated. "I'll be the next to go," she predicted — and indeed, Holiday died four months later.
Wilson's song imagines a message from Holiday to Young. As she sings:
"When I sing this song, it sounds more like there's a chorus, in terms of the musicians who join me," Wilson says. "And it is more emphatic, because it's ridiculous that we would still be dealing with these issues in 2015."
Wilson did contribute one original song, which she calls "Last Song (For Lester)." Holiday and tenor saxophonist Lester Young were the closest of collaborators — "musical soulmates," Wilson says — who had a falling out. When Holiday first learned of Young's death, Holiday immediately flew back to the U.S. from London to be at the funeral, where she expected to be able to sing for her dear friend. When she was barred from performing, she was devastated. "I'll be the next to go," she predicted — and indeed, Holiday died four months later.
Wilson's song imagines a message from Holiday to Young. As she sings:
You are my morning star
Forever rising, forever breaking my heart
But I'd do it — I'd do it all again
If they would let me sing the last song for you
Cassandra Wilson
by Glenn O'Brien
April 1, 1999
Cassandra Wilson.
Photos for BOMB by Farrell Duncan © 1999
Photos for BOMB by Farrell Duncan © 1999
Cassandra Wilson is one of the most innovative and compelling
musicians working today in the increasingly hard-to-define (and maybe
that’s good) world of jazz. She’s a singer, a contralto who sometimes
reminds me of Betty Carter and sometimes of Abby Lincoln but who is
always true to her own evolving musicianship. She has recorded about a
dozen albums as a leader, including the best-sellers Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter.
These recordings are distinguished by innovative arrangements and
textures and an extraordinarily eclectic choice of material, including
songs from sources as diverse as Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, Hoagy
Carmichael, Van Morrison, U2, Neil Young, and Hank Williams, as well as
her own compositions, which easily hold their own amid the masters. She
has also lent her vocal talents to numerous projects of her peers,
perhaps most notably in her performance as Leona, a slave, in Wynton
Marsalis’s jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields. Her new album Traveling Miles is a tribute to Miles Davis and features compositions made famous by the legendary trumpet player.
Glenn O’Brien Was
doing an album of Miles Davis material your idea? I know you were
commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center to do a Miles tribute, but what
was the origin of it?
Cassandra Wilson The idea first came out on the Blood on the Fields
tour. We talked with Rob Gibson at Lincoln Center who commissioned the
Traveling Miles tour and I suggested the tribute to Miles Davis and that
led to doing a recording.
GO You’d done a couple of things associated with Miles before, right? Like Round Midnight, I think that’s on one of your records.
CW Yes.
GO It’s in your bio that when you were a kid you heard Sketches of Spain around the house. Was your father a Miles fan?
CW Big Miles fan. Miles, Cannonball Adderly, and he loved Jimmy Smith. Sarah Vaughan he loved, Nancy Wilson. Yeah, Sketches of Spain
was one of the first albums I remember listening to as a toddler and I
remember the album cover, especially, as a kid you get drawn to what’s
highly visual. I’d just sit and look at the cover and listen to the
music.
GO Did you connect with jazz at a young age?
CW I didn’t know it to be jazz, I just knew it to be music. So when you use that word . . . Did I at five or six years old know that this was jazz?
At that age I don’t think I knew what the name of it was. But I knew
that my daddy loved this music and I would sit and listen to it and play
while he was listening. I was, you know, always at his feet, hanging
out and doing the things that he enjoyed, finding pleasure in the things
that he enjoyed.
GO And what was the first record you ever bought?
CW A Monkees record, the one that had “Last Train to Clarksville” on it— which I put on New Moon Daughter.
GO Was that ’cause you’d seen them on TV?
CW Yeah. I used to watch The Monkees
out of the corner of my eye when I had my piano lessons. Saturdays
about three or four o’clock every week, that’s when it would come on, at
the tail end of my lesson. My brothers were watching it in the other
room, and I’d be really distracted. I’d be trying to do my lesson and
watch The Monkees.
GO What did your piano teacher think of The Monkees?
CW He didn’t really care. (laughter)
He didn’t. He had a very relaxed approach to teaching. The one thing I
remember about him was that he didn’t care about the numbers for the
fingerings on the page either, which was really unusual. Most piano
teachers follow that like the Bible. You know? There are numbers under
each note to tell you which finger you’re supposed to use and he may
have used them, but he didn’t care about it; that was not really a
sticking point for him. When you performed, when you played in front of
him, he looked at the whole piece and what you brought to it.
GO What kind of pieces did you learn on?
CW The usual stuff: The Clementi-type sonatas, the Beethoven stuff, “Für Elise,” “Moonlight Sonata.” That whole course.
GO You had a little group when you were in high school?
CW
Yes. The first group I had was in high school with these guys who
played guitar and we did a lot of cover material. We did a lot of James
Taylor, some Joni Mitchell tunes, Bob Dylan, Richie Havens—that version
of “Here Comes The Sun”—that kind of stuff.
GO And did you start to write original stuff in that context?
CW Well, I was writing original material when I first started playing the guitar when I was 12.
GO Did you play in that group or did you sing?
CW I played and sang in that group, yeah.
GO Guitar or piano?
CW Guitar.
GO Is that your best instrument?
CW
I don’t know if I would describe it as my best. I go back and forth
between the piano and the guitar, whenever I get bored with one.
Switching makes it easier for me to get reignited.
GO Is one more useful for you in songwriting than the other?
CW
The piano is still very much an instrument that I relate to
technically, although I certainly didn’t have as formal an education on
it as most people but still there’s a connection I make mentally every
time I sit down at the piano. There’s a connection I make to ways of
looking at how to create music technically. That doesn’t happen on the
guitar because I taught myself the guitar. There was no teacher for the
guitar. My father gave me a couple of guitar method books. I think he
realized I was tired of taking lessons and thought it’d be a good idea
for me to learn an instrument on my own and create a relationship with
an instrument without someone conducting the lessons.
GO
I remember reading this thing about Miles—I don’t know if it was an
interview or on liner notes—but he was talking about his influences in
his playing and none of the people he mentioned were trumpet players. It
was like Ahmad Jamal, Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles’s voice. As a singer
were you more influenced by singers or instrumentalists?
CW
I don’t know if that’s something I can measure. I think I’ve been
influenced by both, and I go through periods where I’m more influenced
by instrumentalists, and periods where I’m influenced by singers. It’s
not something I can quantify.
GO You’ve made records with horn players on certain tracks but have you ever had horn in your regular group?
CW No. (laughter) I have not.
GO Are your vocals the horn in the group?
CW Yes.
GO You live in New York, right?
CW Yes.
GO
It seems like 30 or 40 years ago, even more recently, there were a lot
of clubs where musicians used to go to sit in with each other. But does
that kind of community exist anymore? How do you know everybody?
CW
I think everybody still knows everybody and knows of everybody. I don’t
think people have that immediate sense of what’s happening anymore
because of what’s happened uptown especially after the clubs in Harlem
began to disappear. Then the younger musicians started depending more on
the downtown scene in order to jam and to learn the music. When I first
came to New York in ’82 there was a very strong scene uptown in Harlem
as well as downtown. So a young musician could go into a club like
Lickety-Split or Small’s Paradise or Carl’s on the Corner, which was at
145th and Broadway—there’s a McDonald’s there now. You could go to these
clubs and hang out and see the older musicians and develop a
relationship with them and learn from them, you know, serve a kind of
apprenticeship. I don’t know if that’s still intact today. I think there
are a lot of younger musicians who go out and hang out and develop
ideas on their own, but I don’t think the older musicians are there as
much.
GO Maybe New York
isn’t such a friendly place for older musicians to live anymore. It
seems like the old bop guys would rather live in Stockholm or Paris. The
other night I saw that you have a couple of really young guys in the
group. How did you find your drummer and piano player? Those guys were
great, by the way. Your piano player was pretty laid back and then
suddenly he played this solo and I was practically falling from my
chair.
CW I feel very
fortunate. That’s Jason Moran. Jason fascinates me. I would love to be
able to create more space for him to improvise. But I get the sense he’s
content because the spaces he does get he really develops well and he’s
comfortable and that’s good. Marcus Baylor is the drummer. He has got a
lot of technique and we work on him: Lonnie, my musical director, and I
talk to him constantly about getting other sounds in the music—you
know, how to invest yourself emotionally. It’s not all about having the
chops or showing off how much you know or how much you can do on the
drums, but having something inside the music that you can connect with
emotionally. He’s come a long way.
GO How long have you been working with your bassist and musical director, Lonnie Plesico?
CW
We met about 15 years ago, but he didn’t join my band till about six,
seven years ago. He’s worked with so many people. Art Blakey, Dexter
Gordon. Before he joined me he was working with Greg Osby a lot.
GO
In the old days, pre-electric Miles, the producer put the session
together and sat there while the tape ran. Now, I guess, through the
impact of technology and also the influence of pop music, the producer
is a whole different thing. I know you’ve produced yourself a lot and
worked with a lot of pretty interesting producers, but how . . . how do
you see that role? I mean . . . uh, save me . . .
CW No, go ahead. (laughter) That’s what I say to my producers: “Save me.”
GO Is that the role of the producer, a savior?
CW Yeah, that’s one role.
GO You worked with a pretty interesting producer, Craig Street.
CW I learned a lot from him.
GO
I really liked the stuff that you did with him. It was very original.
And I was kind of knocked out by that k. d. lang record he made. I don’t
know, it opened my eyes to her. And it had some really interesting
textures on it. Do you think it’s important that a record is duplicable
in performance?
CW No, not
at all. Most of the time it isn’t. Because you have this rarefied
environment where you create this music. You’re not going to recreate it
live, so you just use it as a road map. It’s a framework, a foundation.
And I find that all the music we begin to perform live is so different
from what we started with.
GO How much is improvised from night to night? I mean, how is it different from Wednesday to Thursday?
CW
Depends. Each night is very different because of the improvisation. The
structures are the same, the song forms may or may not be the same as
every other night. I want to get the band to the point where we can
alter the form right there—you wanna just hang inside of a certain
change, or be in a space for a couple more bars than you did the night
before and allow room for the development of ideas. That has to
happen to keep the music in a growth mode. It has to constantly evolve
and, hopefully, take us from this project to the next.
GO I don’t know if it was in the review in the Times
that you got, or somewhere else that I read a reference to you talking
about the jazz police, I guess referring to people with very strict
ideas about what jazz is supposed to be. And then—I don’t know if you
saw it—in the Times yesterday, all the critics named their
ten best uncategorizable records for the year. There were some really
interesting choices, things from all around the world and weird American
stuff that doesn’t fall into any easy category. I guess that’s
something that you deal with because you like doing songs by a variety
of artists from U2 or the Monkees to Robert Johnson and Son House. Do
you think that the business is going to get any better as far as dealing
with really great artists where they don’t know which rack to put them
in or what radio station to play them on? Do you see things opening up
at all, as far as transcending category goes?
CW Sure. I hope so. I do.
GO
It’s a big problem with radio. There’s a few college stations that will
play anything, but it seems like in this country, it’s very bad as far
as stations being regimented by playlists goes.
CW
Radio’s sad. I don’t listen to radio because you turn to a station and
you hear basically the same song being recycled. It’s the same music, a
particular kind of music, and it’s all become so specialized that you
don’t get the music that falls in between. Instead of the really
interesting music you get the more formulaic music. And I don’t recall
music being that way when I was coming up in the ’60s and in the ’70s.
GO
I remember things crossing over in the ’60s, which could never happen
today. Ray Charles had a lot of hits on the country charts and there was
that guy—I forget his name—who had that song in
Japanese—"Sukiyaki"—that went to number one! (laughter) I just
don’t think anything like that could happen today. I tried to find that
k. d. lang record all over Tower Records and couldn’t. I looked under
vocalists, I looked in the pop section on the first floor, and finally I
said, “Do you have the k. d. lang record?” They said, “Oh yeah, that’s
country.” And if you listen to the record there’s nothing at all country
about it but I guess it’s hard to break out of the category. What do
you listen to? You don’t listen to radio, do you listen to music?
CW Yes. I cover a lot of ground and try to listen to as many different kinds of music as possible.
GO
I try to push myself not to just listen to old music all the time
because I could very easily just listen to old masters and not check out
anything new. The things these critics from the Times
wrote about are things that you have to go out of your way to find.
That’s their full-time job. But today, the burden is really on the
listener.
CW Yes. What’s new is not really readily accessible.
GO
But if you go to Europe and turn on the radio, sometimes you’ll hear
the weirdest mix of things. Something African followed by some pop song.
It’s very educational in a way.
CW Yeah, yeah. But they’re much more mature. (laughter) They’re farther along in terms of openness than we are here in the States.
GO Your record Jump World
presents a theory about music and its spiritual effects. Obviously
there’s a lot of music that’s uplifting and healing but do you think
there’s music that has negative effects?
CW We hear about people committing suicide. And (laughter)
they listen to music—I’d say—that’s pretty negative. Certain kinds of
music have negative effects, sure, I think that’s possible.
GO
Sometimes I hear things and think well, maybe I’m just like, old. Maybe
if I were 17 I would understand what this speed metal is all about, but
. . .
CW I think the
nihilism is real, it’s there. And it’s a phase, a trend, and it tells us
a lot about who we are. You can’t really separate yourself from the
people who are listening to that music and digging it; there’s a reason
why.
GO But it’s kind of difficult to figure out where it comes from and where it finds that form. I mean there was this thing on 60 Minutes
a couple of weeks ago about an Israeli conductor and this controversy
over him performing Wagner, whose music is almost illegal in Israel, and
he was saying that there’s nothing racist in the music—just because
Hitler liked it.
CW You
can’t look at Wagner in a vacuum. You associate his music with a
particular epoch or period in man’s evolution and history, you connect
it with some sort of dogma. I think people will look upon some of the
more negative rap music the same way. You connect it with a certain
ideology. That might be too big of a word for what exactly is happening
but I think you can’t separate the music. You can’t look at it as this
pure thing that exists outside of its context. People will always
associate certain kinds of music or certain trends in music with the
historical context, don’t you think?
GO
Yeah, I do. I know that you’re really into the Delta blues stuff. It’s
interesting what happened with blues in the ’60s—it being adopted by
mass pop culture, exposing that music to a whole new audience. But maybe
there’s a negative side. I think it’s great if someone takes that music
and plays it the way it was written. But then sometimes people try to
change something and so what effect does that have on the blues? You
have a beat—it’s like a classical beat that maybe comes from Africa or
Haiti, that’s a very specific rhythm, or a very specific chord. People
change it to make it theirs, to make it original, and maybe that
adulterates it in some way.
CW
No. It’s your responsibility as a jazz musician not to adulterate, but
to augment, to extend, to amplify, to reconfigure, because that’s the
whole foundation, that’s the whole basis of this music, jazz. That’s why
it’s considered to be derived more from an African aesthetic than a
European aesthetic. It’s dynamic and life can enter into it. There’s a
parallel between the religion and the music. It’s a living music, as is
the religion—that has not been really acknowledged as a part of that
tradition, but I think the two parallel each other. Religion goes
through so many manifestations in order to survive.
GO
I thought one of the good things about hip-hop was that you could take a
phrase from a record and appropriate it and repeat it the way it was
without feeling like, Well, I have to change this, ’cause of copyright
laws, or to make it seem like I wrote it or so I can put my name on it.
In a way that was a breakthrough because I don’t think you can own a
chord, a chord change—
CW No, you can’t.
GO
So to say, Yeah, it’s okay to repeat that, I think was good. And I
guess that was what the bop guys did when they would take standards—
CW Oh my God! (laughter)
GO —and rearrange them.
CW
That’s a large part of the methodology in bebop. You take things and
turn them upside down. Bird did that constantly. You write tunes over
tunes. Then people come along who will write tunes over his tunes.
Throughout the tradition of jazz you have people constantly rearranging
the music and calling it something new. I talk about this on the set
when I do “Prancing,” which is a tune derived from Miles Davis’s
original, “original” called “Francing,” but if you break it down and you
slow it down and listen to the main melody line, it’s a blues lick from
Muddy Waters. And I’m sure that somebody else wrote it a long time
before Muddy Waters. It’s a basic blues lick—everybody knows it,
everybody plays it. Muddy Waters created a song based on that motif.
Miles Davis came along and added a bebopping inflection to it, threw
some triplet fields inside of it and called it “Francing.” Change the
chords that ride beneath the melody and it becomes a bebop standard.
GO Was it easy for you to pick out the stuff from Miles’s repertoire that you were gonna do? There’s so much there.
CW
Yeah, it was pretty easy. I just let things happen. It all kind of came
to me, instead of me going out looking for it. There’s such a large
body of Miles Davis’s work; it spans five, six decades. So I really had
to wait and see what would pop up and what would resonate.
GO I really liked you writing lyrics for some stuff that didn’t have lyrics. Did you ever hear Carmen McRae’s Monk album?
CW Yeah, it’s fantastic.
GO
She wrote words to songs that never had lyrics and they’re
phenomenal—it’s like they were sitting in the same room composing the
songs.
CW It is beautiful.
GO What are you listening to these days for pleasure?
CW A lot of Brazilian music for some reason. I love Brazilian music, I love it. I just have to have it with me constantly. There’s an album called Elis and Tom
with Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina who’s a famous Brazilian
singer, she sings these pieces and just blows me away. The orchestration
is so rich. Pixinguinha is a guy I’ve been listening to who was a
contemporary of Duke Ellington. It’s very orchestrated, but kind of
weird music—very, very complex rhythmically. I gravitate towards music
that is rich rhythmically.
GO You ever been to Cuba?
CW No, but I plan on going there real soon, real soon. Gotta get there.
GO I think that’ll have a great effect on music when that opens up . . .
CW Oh God, I can’t wait.
GO Have you been to Brazil?
CW Yes.
GO Played there?
CW
Yes. I was there about four years ago in São Paulo and Rio, did the
festival there. I didn’t get to Bahia, that’s the spot I wanted, I still
want, to get to. I saw Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in concert
together, and it was remarkable, I was so touched by that concert. The
thing I really love about Brazilian music is that there’s always the
underpinning of the religious and spiritual beliefs. And it’s so funny.
Almost every one of those artists sings about Brazil, and you almost
always hear some point in any song where they go, (singing) “Oh Brazil.” (laughter)
We don’t do that in America, we don’t have any kind of music that
points to our pride in our country. And I was thinking about that the
other day. There’s a great deal of poverty in Brazil, I’ve seen it, I’ve
witnessed it firsthand. Yet, the people are still so devoted to their
national art, and culture, and you hear that in their music.
GO There’s one question I really wanted to ask you. Are you conducting the band with your hair? (laughter)
CW I’m conducting the band with everything. Everything!
I conduct the band with my feet if they can see them—I stand on
tip-toe. My hands, everything, whatever I can use, I try to give them
cues to what I’m feeling.
The Telegraph
Cassandra Wilson tells Peter Culshaw about avoiding musical perfection, her African heritage and a surprising discovery about one of the great blues standards.
10 November 2010
She has spent time since her discovery researching the Tudors, and also thinks the New Orleans standard St James Infirmary – a version of which is on her new album, Silver Pony
– refers to the old St James’s Hospital for lepers in London. “St
James’s Palace is now on that site – built by Henry VIII. So a song
everyone thought was a New Orleans traditional standard is based on an
old English folk song.”
The other, more obvious part of the jazz singer’s heritage is an African one. Although brought up a Presbyterian in Jackson, Mississippi she has become a Yoruba priestess, following the spiritual path of her West African forebears. “I’m a Priestess of Oshun, the deity of music and rivers.”
There is certainly a depth to Cassandra Wilson’s music and her rich, emotive contralto voice suggests some powerful roots are being drawn on. Now 55, she is at the peak of her powers, winning her second Grammy award last year. Her jazz DNA stands in lineage from Billie Holiday to her mentor Abbey Lincoln and runs counter to the Peggy Lee pop-jazz line being mined by the likes of Norah Jones and Diane Krall. Not that she is snobbish (unlike many jazz buffs) about the likes of Jones, who is on the same Blue Note label. “What she does is amazing and wonderful – and a great thing for the label. But I wouldn’t want to change places with her. I much prefer to be under the radar: it gives you more freedom. ”
Wilson’s version of being “under the
radar” is still fairly high-profile. Her breakthrough album of 1995, New
Moon Daughter, sold 250,000 copies and won her her first Grammy. What
has defined her work throughout her 30-year career has been a mission to
bring other kinds of music – pop, rock, soul, blues and gospel into
the hermetically sealed world of jazz. Her 1990s albums were notable for
the rich variety of covers from Hank Williams to Joni Mitchell and even
a jazz reworking of the Monkees hit Last Train to Clarksville. “I was brought up on both the Beatles and Miles Davis – it feels natural to do a big range of tunes.”
Her new album includes a Lennon-McCartney evergreen, Blackbird, and a Stevie Wonder tune, If It’s Magic, as well as a version of the Charlie Patton blues classic Pony Blues. “Not many people have covered him. People know a little of Robert Johnson, and they look at him as being the father of the Delta Blues, but Charlie was the real pioneer.”
Half of Silver Pony was recorded live on her tour of Europe last year, the other half at Piety Studios in New Orleans, a city she lived in at the outset of her career in the mid-Seventies. “I remember everywhere you looked, you would hear music. The French Quarter was so vibrant.”
A particular favourite joint was the great pianist Professor Longhair’s infamous club, Tipitina’s. “I’ve never witnessed anything like that scene. It was so juicy and rich – New Orleans at its best.” After Hurricane Katrina, though, she says wistfully, the city isn’t the same, “A lot of those street musicians haven’t come back because there is simply nowhere for them to come back to.”
Silver Pony is an album filled with nostalgia. The cover photo comes from a formative childhood experience for Wilson. “A man came around my neighbourhood in Jackson with a pony and camera, and you could pay to get your picture taken.” Her brothers declined, but the young Wilson longed to have a go and her mother hesitated before relenting. “I’m happy that she let me ride the pony. I was fearless, and I guess she wanted to encourage that.”
She spent a lot of time looking after her mother, who had Alzheimer’s and who died last year. The album is a kind of memorial to her spirit.
Wilson also lost her mentor and friend, the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln, who died last August. “You get a lot from an artist like that just being in the same room, listening to her and watching her. I learnt a great deal: how to approach music and how to really inhabit a song. I saw her four days before she passed away. Even then I felt she was teaching me.”
Wilson has continually tried to plug into history. In the Eighties, she lived in the same apartment block in Harlem that had once been home to such luminaries as Count Basie and Lena Horne. “The apartments had a really powerful vibe,” she says. The vibe, in both her home and studio life, is “the most important thing”.
Although she has recorded with Wynton Marsalis as lead singer on his Blood on the Fields Oratorio, she has no time for his purist approach or belief that jazz is “America’s classical music”. “I love European classical music, but his approach is using someone else’s values to gauge who you are.”
When I comment that the guitar part on her version of St. James' Infirmary is way out of tune, she says: “It’s richly out of tune, beautifully out of tune. That’s the music I pray for. If it’s too in tune, it can get stale. We end up being where we’ve been before.” The important thing is “not to be a copyist. That’s the really big challenge with each album. Even if you are copying yourself, it’s not really jazz.”
'Silver Pony’ is released on Blue Note Live on November 22.
Her new album includes a Lennon-McCartney evergreen, Blackbird, and a Stevie Wonder tune, If It’s Magic, as well as a version of the Charlie Patton blues classic Pony Blues. “Not many people have covered him. People know a little of Robert Johnson, and they look at him as being the father of the Delta Blues, but Charlie was the real pioneer.”
Half of Silver Pony was recorded live on her tour of Europe last year, the other half at Piety Studios in New Orleans, a city she lived in at the outset of her career in the mid-Seventies. “I remember everywhere you looked, you would hear music. The French Quarter was so vibrant.”
A particular favourite joint was the great pianist Professor Longhair’s infamous club, Tipitina’s. “I’ve never witnessed anything like that scene. It was so juicy and rich – New Orleans at its best.” After Hurricane Katrina, though, she says wistfully, the city isn’t the same, “A lot of those street musicians haven’t come back because there is simply nowhere for them to come back to.”
Silver Pony is an album filled with nostalgia. The cover photo comes from a formative childhood experience for Wilson. “A man came around my neighbourhood in Jackson with a pony and camera, and you could pay to get your picture taken.” Her brothers declined, but the young Wilson longed to have a go and her mother hesitated before relenting. “I’m happy that she let me ride the pony. I was fearless, and I guess she wanted to encourage that.”
She spent a lot of time looking after her mother, who had Alzheimer’s and who died last year. The album is a kind of memorial to her spirit.
Wilson also lost her mentor and friend, the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln, who died last August. “You get a lot from an artist like that just being in the same room, listening to her and watching her. I learnt a great deal: how to approach music and how to really inhabit a song. I saw her four days before she passed away. Even then I felt she was teaching me.”
Wilson has continually tried to plug into history. In the Eighties, she lived in the same apartment block in Harlem that had once been home to such luminaries as Count Basie and Lena Horne. “The apartments had a really powerful vibe,” she says. The vibe, in both her home and studio life, is “the most important thing”.
Although she has recorded with Wynton Marsalis as lead singer on his Blood on the Fields Oratorio, she has no time for his purist approach or belief that jazz is “America’s classical music”. “I love European classical music, but his approach is using someone else’s values to gauge who you are.”
When I comment that the guitar part on her version of St. James' Infirmary is way out of tune, she says: “It’s richly out of tune, beautifully out of tune. That’s the music I pray for. If it’s too in tune, it can get stale. We end up being where we’ve been before.” The important thing is “not to be a copyist. That’s the really big challenge with each album. Even if you are copying yourself, it’s not really jazz.”
'Silver Pony’ is released on Blue Note Live on November 22.
The Root Interview: Cassandra Wilson
Cassandra Wilson chats with The Root as she preps for the release of her new album and an upcoming tour with Prince.
With her 1993 recording Blue Light ‘Til Dawn,
Cassandra Wilson changed the course of jazz. Until then, most jazz was
either traditional, experimental or a fusion of jazz and pop. Wilson
showed that it could be all three by blending jazz and Delta blues and
applying her sound to a repertoire that ranged from blues and jazz
standards to classic rock. The recording was a landmark commercial and
artistic success. Since then, a lot of boundaries have fallen, and
musicians feel more comfortable playing what’s in their hearts and heads
rather than taking sides in an academic argument.
The Root: Your last recording, Loverly (2008), was a collection of jazz standards. How did you transition from that disc to Silver Pony, and why are some of the songs recorded live?
Cassandra Wilson: A few of these songs were in our repertoire with the group that performed on that recording, but as the new group came together, we began to pick and choose new songs. We just played them in the studio and some worked; some will never see the light of day. (Laughs.) We were really having a good time performing them, so we decided to put some of the songs in front of an audience, just to see what would happen.
TR: How did your collaboration with John Legend on the song “Watch the Sunrise” come about?
CW: Happenstance. Some of our friends overlap, and John conveyed a message that he had a song for me. He was a big fan of New Moon Daughter [Wilson’s 1995 opus]. I was shocked and flattered, but when I met him, he was really humble.
TR: You’re on Prince’s “Welcome 2 America” Tour. How did that happen?
CW: He came to see me a few years ago when I played the Jazz Cafe in London and was kind enough to chat after the show. He’s a beautiful spirit, full of charm and grace. As for being invited to join Prince on the “Welcome 2 America” Tour, I’m tickled purple!
TR: You’re from Mississippi. Isn’t some of that the music you heard growing up? I would imagine you heard a lot of blues, both urban and rural.
CW: A little, but not really. It wasn’t something that we listened to a lot at home. We listened to what was considered more cultivated music. It wasn’t until later when I was able to investigate my roots that I heard a lot of blues.
TR: So the same schism that permeates our community now between urban and rural — I mean, why is “country” an epithet? — was present even down South when you were growing up? Those biases are sturdy.
CW: Yes, definitely. I got a lot of that when I did Blue Light ‘Til Dawn. There was a great resistance. People said I was turning away from something more sophisticated for something less.
TR: I liked your Facebook post on Super Bowl Sunday about the New Orleans Saints and what their win meant for their fans and the city. Are you still living in New Orleans?
CW: I live everywhere, or at least it feels that way. We have the place in New Orleans, Jackson [Miss.], Woodstock [N.Y.], and we just got the apartment back in New York City. I haven’t spent more than two weeks in one place in a long time. It’s hard to find your center when you live like that; you have to have a different anchor. But I feel a connection to each place.
TR: Do you spend much time on the Internet?
CW: I use as many social networking vehicles as possible to connect with people. It’s important, though sometimes you have to tell people to step off. I had to do that with someone when the discussion of the Park51 project turned heated. It’s good to do sometimes, clear your space.
TR: What are you listening to these days?
CW: Abbey [Lincoln], some Billie [Holiday], too. There are some singers that I’m constantly learning from. I’m always finding new elements that draw me to their music. Right now it seems that I’m listening to their phrasing a lot. When they sing, certain words pop out of a song in a unique way.
Martin Johnson is a regular contributor to The Root.
Seattle Times
May 29, 2010
Time after time, jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson continues to surprise
Jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson brings her diverse repertoire to Seattle for a Jazz Alley gig June 3-6.
Once you hear her deep-amber voice, honeyed and smokey, it is unmistakable. But the repertoire of jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson continually surprises.
The bewitching singer, at Jazz Alley in the coming days for her first Seattle gig in this decade, has one of the most diverse discographies of any top jazz chanteuse.
The Jackson, Miss., native recently released a retrospective of pop covers, “Closer to You,” featuring her arrestingly unique interpretations of songs by the likes of U2, Neil Young, Cyndi Lauper.
Over her 20-year-plus career, she’s also cast her sensuous spell on Broadway melodies, the instrumental tunes of trumpeter Miles Davis, Brazilian sambas, old-time Delta blues, self-penned experimental-jazz originals.
In a voice softer and higher than her deep-river singing timbre, Wilson chats by phone about being a song connoisseur, collector, historian and medium.
“I always say that I don’t choose the material, it chooses me,” she declares. “Because a song, especially if it’s got a good story and something I can connect with emotionally, will just stick around in my head and I won’t be able to get rid of it.”
One tune sticking lately? “Pony Blues.”
“I found it in a real weird, roundabout way,” she says. “I was involved in this project about Langston Hughes, and in his book of poems, ‘Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,’ he quoted a lyric that began, ‘Hello, Central.’
“It was from a song called ‘Hesitation Blues,’ and in a book I was reading about the Delta blues, I found out blues singer Charlie Patton wrote it, so I tracked it down. I like to research those kinds of patterns in the blues.”
Wilson also has Joni Mitchell stuck in her brain. On her gorgeous hit 1996 disc “Blue Light ‘Til Dawn,” with producer Craig Street, she carved out a rootsy, acoustic sound in a spooky-stunning version of Mitchell’s “Black Crow,” that propelled her music in a whole new direction.
But Wilson passes on songs, even by her favorite artists, when they don’t speak to her. “It’s really not so much about the style or the genre, because you can tear that up or build a new structure. It’s about the message.”
Billie Holiday is one of her big influences (with jazz divas Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln and Nancy Wilson). But she chose not to record “Deep Song,” a Holiday blues tune recommended to her.
“It has an exquisite harmonic architecture, but the lyric was too dark for me,” Wilson notes. “I said the same thing to Craig Street about the Bono song ‘Love is Blindness,’ but that one has a little tongue-in-cheek stuff in it, too. There was none of that in ‘Deep Song.’ It was pretty desperate.”
The divorced mother of a 21-year-old son, Wilson hasn’t made it to Seattle lately because she’s worked mainly on the East Coast and in Europe. She divides her off time between homes in upstate New York, Mississippi and New Orleans. “I love all three for different reasons. New Orleans has a lot going on, musically there’s a real flourishing down there.”
Wilson has finished a new disc, which she says she might just release via Facebook. And to her delight, pop star John Legend wrote a new tune for her.
“There are quite a few younger artists out there like John, who are learning their history, and making their way to an understanding of a broader traditional dynamic,” she says. “John has a really powerful, distinct voice. His material is wonderful, and I know it will continue to evolve.”
“One band is guitar-based, in the style of the [album] ‘New Moon Daughter’ material. The other band I’m bringing to Seattle. It’s from my jazz head, a group of five or six pieces with very expressive, powerful soloists.”
She muses, “I wish I could work with both bands at the same time, choosing back and forth from different material. That would be great.”
Yes indeed. And Wilson fans can dream, can’t we?
Cassandra Wilson
Cassandra Wilson: Subtle singer, subversive songwriter and 2022 NEA Jazz Master
WBGO and Jazz at Lincoln Center
For Cassandra Wilson’s 60th Birthday, a Jazz Times Feature From 2012 and a Downbeat Feature from 2008
To mark the 60th birthday of the great singer Cassandra Wilson, I’m posting a pair of feature articles I’ve had the opportunity to write about her — first a long piece for Jazz Times in 2012, next a feature for Downbeat in 2008.
* * *
Cassandra Wilson, ‘Jazz Times’ Article (2012):
On Memorial Day, as afternoon turned to evening and the barbecues wound down in the brownstone back yards next to Complete Music Studios in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights district, Cassandra Wilson convened her band for a five-hour rehearsal to prepare for a one-week run that would launch two days hence in Bergen, Norway, continue in Lviv, Ukraine, and conclude in Moscow. Ensconced in Room 4 of the sprawling converted warehouse, they worked methodically through the set list, postulating frameworks for such older Wilson standbys as “Fragile” and “Time After Time,” and newer repertoire like “Red Guitar” and “Another Country” (both from Wilson’s June release, Another Country [E1]), and a stark, intense arrangement of “The Man I Love” by harmonicist Gregoire Maret, Wilson’s current musical director, and a steady presence in her bands since 2003. They sat in a circle, Maret to Wilson’s left, and then, proceeding clockwise, guitarist Brandon Ross, drummer John Davis, bassist Ben Williams (filling the chair for Reginald Veal, who would join the troupe in Europe, as would percussion Lekan Babaola), and guitarist Marvin Sewell.
The final song was Wilson’s “A Little Warm Death,” which she debuted on New Moon Daughter, her 1995 chart-topper. Wilson was navigating the concluding vamp (“One little warm death/Come have one little warm death with me tonight”), denoting the time feel with gracefully calibrated arm swoops, when, suddenly, she interrupted the flow.
“It’s a lazy rhythm,” Wilson said casually, looking at Davis, a recent addition to the band. Her blondish dreads hung loose, and she wore a diaphanous earth-toned blouse, white capri slacks, gray espadrilles, and clef-shaped earrings. A red Telecaster guitar stood to the right of her chair; a closed Mac-Pro was on the floor to her left. “In Bahia, they’ve got a thing, too, where they’re way behind the beat. Most instrumentalists want you to push it. But most singers, like me, we want to lay back—we’re lazy.” She offhandedly referenced several rappers. “They got some serious swag way behind the beat.”
After a final runthrough of “A Little Warm Death,” Ross asked Wilson to try the Lennon-McCartney song, “Tomorrow Never Knows.” “I don’t really know it yet,” Wilson responded. “Can you sing it?” Ross complied; Wilson listened attentively, smiled encouragingly, beat the rhythm on her knees. “Nice,” she said after Ross’ quick Polaroid of his intentions. While Ross and Davis established the changes and key, she opened the Macbook, and, scrolling with her big toe, talked out the lyrics from the screen. In due time, she closed the computer, sat erect, planted her feet, and claimed possession with a completely realized interpretation, bobbing and weaving within the rhythm, her infinitely flexible contralto conveying nuance and unveiling implication.
The Cosmopolitan View of a Country Girl: Another Country by Cassandra Wilson with Fabrizio Sotti
by Daniel Garrett
Cassandra Wilson, Another Country
featuring Fabrizio Sotti
Produced by Wilson and Sotti
Entertainment One (E One), 2012
“It’s your responsibility as a jazz musician not to adulterate, but to augment, to extend, to amplify, to reconfigure, because that’s the whole foundation, that’s the whole basis of this music, jazz…It’s dynamic and life can enter into it.”
—Cassandra Wilson to Bomb magazine (Spring 1999)
Cassandra Wilson has explored a lot of experiences, a lot of music, and that is testament to her curiosity, imagination, and intellect; and her album Another Country, created in collaboration with Fabrizio Sotti, has an elegance that is thoughtful and timeless. Cassandra Wilson’s song “Red Guitar” is painterly, poetic, its instrumentation classical and bluesy, with drumming that is precise and lively, whereas “No More Blues,” a song of determination in which misery is shown the door, is itself a light blues tune with finger-snap rhythm, a slowed-down beat with jangling assets, mellow, verging on strange. (“Just like Frank, I’m gonna do it my way,” Wilson says, an aside acknowledging Sinatra.) “O Sole Mio,” mellow, a little melancholy, has a Latin flavor; and, the Italian-language composition, a popular Neapolitan tune sung by Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza, is here given a casually propulsive syncopation, and is pretty, possibly beautiful, followed by the meditative instrumental “Deep Blue.”
Hearing Cassandra Wilson’s Another Country, it is impossible not to think of some of her other work: Jumpworld (1990), She Who Weeps (1991), Blue Light ’Til Dawn (1993), New Moon Daughter (1996), and Traveling Miles (1999). I love the energy and expanse of vision in Jumpworld and Traveling Miles. Cassandra Wilson has been interesting for always sounding as if she is thinking, alive in and to the moment; and her taste has brought together different cultural forms. The daughter of a jazz guitarist father and schoolteacher mother, the Mississippi-born Cassandra Fowlkes (Wilson), who has lived in New Orleans and New York, grew up appreciating music rather than its labels. A student of the piano and the guitar, Cassandra learned European classical pieces as a girl, and is an admirer of folk and rock music as well as jazz and blues.
Cassandra Wilson’s early days were spent in thrall to Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Neil Young, Ellis Marsalis, Steve Coleman, and Betty Carter. Cassandra Wilson’s first solo recording was 1986’s Point of View, about which The New York Times’ critic Jon Pareles wrote, “The singer Cassandra Wilson aims for a new mixture of jazz and rock on Point of View—loose-limbed music that taps rhythmic drive and electronic timbres of rock but leaves plenty of room to improvise” (August 1, 1986); and that music was followed by 1987’s Days Aweigh, and in 1988 Blue Skies, a collection of standards that made a place for her on the cultural map. Wilson, whose music largely has been on Polygram’s JMT and Blue Note, returned to Mississippi to make 2002’s Belly of the Sun, which contained several blues songs and much of which was recorded in an old train depot. “I think a lot of jazz musicians are afraid of the blues, because there’s a certain emotional vulnerability when you get into this material,” Wilson told the Jazz Times writer Geoffrey Himes (May 2002). Yet, the blues were less a musical form or pleasure the singer had grown up with in Mississippi than a resource she sought after she became recognized as a sophisticate. Wilson has collaborated with Jean-Paul Bourelly, Regina Carter, Angelique Kidjo, John Legend, Jason Moran, and Wynton Marsalis. She still listens to Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln. Cassandra Wilson has been experimental and traditional—and now makes what can be called only Cassandra Wilson music.
On Another Country, from the recording company Entertainment One (E One), Cassandra Wilson’s musical associates are an international group, electric guitarist Fabrizio Sotti (Italy), percussionists Mino Cinelu (France) and Lekan Babalola (Nigeria), electric bassist Nicola Sorato (Italy), and accordionist Julien Labro (France). “It’s a reflective time in my life. I recently lost my mother. And when you lose your mother, it really brings you in touch with your mortality. And that stirred a lot of emotions and memories for me. And I’m becoming an elder, myself,” Cassandra Wilson told Ebony magazine’s internet site at the time of the album’s release. Then and there Wilson spoke of the roots of jazz in the deep American south, in field hollers, in the blues, and relished comparison to Zora Neale Hurston, and recalled the opportunity to discover more about Italian culture in Florence, Italy, while writing and recording music.
Cassandra Wilson’s voice is whispery through the quickly sung verses of Another Country’s “Almost Twelve,” suggesting anticipation, enthusiasm; and that song, written after getting lost in Florence, is Latin and bluesy at once. (“I cover a lot of ground and try to listen to as many different kinds of music as possible,” Wilson had told Bomb magazine’s Glenn O’Brien, for its Spring 1999 issue.) The music of Another Country’s “Passion,” which drew inspiration from viewing great Italian statuary, seems intricate, mystical, and its lyrics are given dramatic inflection. “When Will I See You Again” is ruminative too. The whole assemblage of songs has a classical quality. Has Cassandra Wilson strayed too far in the direction of thought rather than passion? In considering the Wilson collection Another Country, the magazine Downbeat’s critic Christopher Loudoun found the set “remarkably subdued” but declared that “Wilson’s slightly scorched, amber-hued voice remains inimitably stunning, but there is added depth, a heightened sense of raw honesty that mirrors the hushed splendor of Shirley Horn” (July 17, 2012).
“I saw another country in your eyes,” sings Cassandra Wilson in the song “Another Country,” which features sensuously moody bass playing and percussion. It is a reminder that, for many people, it is love more than anything else that delivers transcendence. “I’ve seen so many countries in your eyes,” Wilson amends. “Letting You Go” is an instrumental composition. In “Olomuroro,” a Yoruba folk tale (some claim it’s about nursemaid; others about a food-stealing monster), Wilson is helped by a children’s chorus, from the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (“New Orleans has a very distinctive culture…There’s a very great deal of African retention there. When you go there, you get the sense that you’re in another country,” Wilson told Ebony)—and Wilson’s voice matches the delicacy of the children.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Daniel Garrett, a graduate of the New School for Social Research, and
the principal organizer of the Cultural Politics Discussion Group at
Poets House, is a writer whose work has appeared in The African, All
About Jazz, American Book Review, Art & Antiques, The Audubon
Activist, Black Film Review, Changing Men, Cinetext, Contact II, Film
International, The Humanist, Hyphen, Illuminations, Muse Apprentice
Guild, Option, Pop Matters, Quarterly Black Review of Books, Rain Taxi,
Red River Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Wax Poetics, and World Literature Today. Daniel Garrett has written extensively about international film for Offscreen, and comprehensive commentary on music for The Compulsive Reader.
http://www.popmatters.com/feature/161085-cassandra-wilson-still-a-jazz-singer-as-she-roams-far-afield/
Wilson’s new record, Another Country, is another exemplar of these two critical characteristics. From the start and throughout, Another Country is plainly Cassandra Wilson, yet it also represents a surprising variety and sense of change. Here is that distinctive voice, that one-of-a-kind sound, yet it is up to new and varied tricks.
Talking about the new recording, her first in almost 20 years away from Blue Note Records, Wilson agreed that she become more herself the more different directions she goes in. “Yes! I feel more confident because I’ve placed myself in so many different contexts. That fuels your belief in yourself. It helps you dig deep.”
For example, Wilson taking on an aria? Yes. Yet she still sounds utterly like Cassandra Wilson.
A Partnership, Again
In the past, Wilson has frequently teamed up with other strong voices to help push her harder into deeper territory. On Another Country she chose to work with jazz guitarist Fabrizio Sotti, recording in his neck of the woods—Florence, Italy.
Early in her career, Wilson worked with Henry Threadgill’s Ensemble New Air, a strong collaborator to say the least. Around the same time, she was working a recording extensively with musicians from Steve Coleman’s “M-BASE Collective,” where she was often somewhat hidden in an ensemble of strong personalities and surging electric grooves. “That,” Wilson notes, “was really, really difficult. It was a great experience but very challenging. I learned a lot. I had to keep up with them. I had to work and study. I had to challenge myself.”
Wilson started to sound like the artist we recognize today in 1993 with her first Blue Note disc, Blue Light Till Dawn. “That was the beginning of me finding a sound that suited my voice. And it helped me to develop a singular voice.” That disc was also a triumph of collaboration with producer Craig Street. “I lucked out when I signed with Bruce Lundvall on Blue Note. He was so knowledgeable and sensed that I was tapping into something. And he allowed me to do it. He wasn’t afraid and didn’t feel I had to follow a particular formula to sell records. He wanted me to express myself. He was really happy with the direction that Craig Street and I were going with the album. He gave me that support that an artist needs to pursue her own voice.”
And on and on. Just as Wilson was becoming clearly herself she signed on to record on a tour with Wynton Marsalis’s brilliant extended work Blood on the Fields, she challenged herself by recording a tribute record to the biggest personality in modern jazz in Traveling Miles, and as recently as 2008 she brought a major soloist in Jason Moran into her Loverly, a recording mostly of jazz standards.
Sotti and Wilson, Exploring Everything
Fabrizio Sotti had collaborated with Wilson before on her disc Glamoured, but he is equally well-known as a highly eclectic player and producer with a track record in pop and hip-hop as well as jazz. What he brings to Another Country is a sense of genuine collaboration that spans multiple cultures, not just the Italian touch provided by “O Solo Mio”.
“It was great to be able to collaborate with him,” Wilson says of Sotti. “It’s the first time I’ve had that kind of collaboration where we wrote the songs together and talked about what they meant, about the structure. For me it’s important to grow, to expand, and this collaboration provided another opportunity.”
The range of this collaboration is remarkable. “Olomuroro”, for example, appears to wrangle a children’s choir to place a set of Japanese lyrics (later sung in English) over a groove built from Sotti’s acoustic guitar, accordion, and hand drums. Wilson weaves her voice around the rest of the song in ways subtle and slinky. Wilson’s voice is a near-whisper on “Almost Twelve”, which uses the same instrumentation but sets it around a lively Brazilian groove that jumps on the strength of Sotti’s strumming. And “Passion” uses a slinky bass figure in combination with flamenco-styled guitar sound to set up a sexy minor melody. The opener, “Red Guitar”, lets Sotti play some electric guitar with jazz flash even as the rhythm section stay in a cool acoustic mode.
More than any other Wilson project since her M-BASE days, Another Country moves the singer into the shadows at times. “Deep Blue” features Sotti alone on acoustic guitar, working a very effective piece of moody impressionism. “Letting You Go” is for two guitars, with Sotti playing a lead line with a gorgeous muted tone. Both of these pieces are intimate, suggesting that Sotti is finding his voice in this context as much as Wilson is.
Different Styles But One Sound
As diverse as the bags are on Another Country, Wilson and Sotti smartly keep the band small and consistent from tune to tune, making sure that the album’s sound is a through-line amidst the variations. Bassist Nicola Sorato and Accordion player Julien Labro work the tunes with tasteful care, and Mino Cinelu and Lekan Babalola add percussion groove on many tunes. The title track is one of the effective at letting the groove take over in a blend of styles rather than a single pose. Even on “O Solo Mio”, which seems perhaps like a stunt, the sound of the group works to turn things into a kind of folk song.
Wilson consciously works with her bands as a collaborator rather than just a singer out front. “As you experiment and associate with like-minded musicians, that when the process is in full swing—you’re well on your way to developing your own unique approach.”
Ultimately, Wilson sees herself as a musician rather than some kind of singer/diva. “You have to remember, I’ve been a musician since I was five years old. The most important thing to me has been the music. When you get together with great musicians, you don’t separate yourself from them. You join them in the quest to make great music. That is the dynamic you need in order to best manifest this music that we call jazz.”
Still a Jazz Singer?
This far down the road of developing her voice, it’s clear that Wilson doesn’t feel bound by any one style. She has worked through pop songs and blues, folk material and American standards—and plenty of traditions from outside the US. But what kind of musician typically feels the freedom to do all of that while still imprinting everything with a very clear, individual sound? That remains the realm of jazz.
“Jazz” is still somewhat Wilson’s identity, even though her art goes beyond the clichés of the style. Still, there is reverence in Wilson’s voice when she uses the word. “The word is just a word. It’s not my favorite word to use to describe improvisational music that grows from the blues,” she says.
But clearly Cassandra Wilson appreciates the importance of the jazz history and legacy that she comes from. “It’s a discipline, an approach, a way of life, of looking at things—much more than a genre. You have people who may understand the mechanics of it, but do they understand the mission of it?
“If you look at the history of the music, how it grows out of an
African-American experience, then the music is about freedom. And that
is the emotion you need to have to express the music.”
In an exclusive Elmore preview of the show, watch a clip of Wilson performing her astounding rendition of “God Bless The Child” below.
Catch the amazing performance on PBS this Saturday at 8pmCT/9pmET, but if you miss it, don’t fret, because you can stream the episode for a limited time immediately after the broadcast here.
Elmore Magazine
EXCLUSIVE: Cassandra Wilson Stuns In A Gorgeous Clip From Her PBS Special
Music News
Austin City Limits opened its 41st Season on October 3rd, and four decades strong, has an astounding line-up for the year ahead, including Don Henley, Gary Clark, Jr. and James Taylor. In an hour long celebration, Grammy award winner Wilson, who was voted “America’s Best Singer” by Time Magazine in 2003, will sing selections from her album Coming Forth by Day, which she released this past April. In Wilson’s first Austin City Limits appearance, she’ll perform with a stunning group of backing musicians, including an 8-piece string section, pianist John Cowherd and Kevin Breit on guitar.In an exclusive Elmore preview of the show, watch a clip of Wilson performing her astounding rendition of “God Bless The Child” below.
Catch the amazing performance on PBS this Saturday at 8pmCT/9pmET, but if you miss it, don’t fret, because you can stream the episode for a limited time immediately after the broadcast here.
Cassandra Wilson on Tavis Smiley
April 2, 2015
The two-time Grammy winner shares on her new project, “Coming Forth By Day,” which serves as a tribute to the great Billie Holiday.
Watch the video: here.
A world-renowned vocalist, songwriter and producer, Cassandra Wilson was crowned by Time magazine as "the true heir of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan." With a string of four consecutive years as Down Beat magazine's top female jazz vocalist, she still maintained a crossover fan base. A native of Jackson, MS, she was classically trained on piano from age 6. After college and a period in New Orleans, she took her chances on the New York jazz scene. The multiple Grammy winner has gained respect from critics, fans, and fellow artists, including the likes of Prince, with whom she toured in 2011. Her latest project, "Coming Forth By Day," honors the great Billie Holiday, who would have turned 100 years old this year.
Cassandra Wilson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cassandra Wilson in 2007
Cassandra Wilson (born December 4, 1955) is an American jazz singer, songwriter, and producer from Jackson, Mississippi.[1] She is one of the most successful female jazz singers and has been described by critic Gary Giddins[2] as "a singer blessed with an unmistakable timbre and attack [who has] expanded the playing field" by incorporating blues, country, and folk music into her work. She has won numerous awards, including two Grammys,[3] and was named "America's Best Singer" by Time magazine in 2001.[4]
Early life and career
Cassandra Wilson is the third and youngest child of Herman Fowlkes, Jr., a guitarist, bassist, and music teacher;[5] and Mary McDaniel, an elementary school teacher who earned her PhD in education. Her ancestry includes Fon, Yoruba, Irish and Welsh. Between her mother's love for Motown and her father's dedication to jazz, Wilson's parents sparked her early interest in music.[6]
Wilson's earliest formal musical education consisted of classical lessons; she studied piano from the age of six to thirteen and played clarinet in the middle school concert and marching bands.[6] When she was tired of this training, she asked her father to teach her the guitar. Instead, he gave her a lesson in self-reliance, suggesting she study Mel Bay method books. Wilson explored guitar on her own, developing what she has described as an "intuitive" approach. During this time she began writing her own songs, adopting a folk style. She also appeared in the musical theater productions, including The Wizard of Oz as Dorothy, crossing racial lines in a recently desegregated school system.
Wilson attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University. She graduated with a degree in mass communications. Outside of the classroom, she spent her nights working with R&B, funk, and pop cover bands, also singing in local coffeehouses. The Black Arts Music Society, founded by John Reese and Alvin Fielder, provided her with her first opportunities to perform bebop. In 2007, Wilson received her PhD in Arts from Millsaps College.
In 1981, she moved to New Orleans for a position as assistant public affairs director for the local television station, WDSU. She did not stay long. Working with mentors who included elder statesmen Earl Turbinton, Alvin Batiste, and Ellis Marsalis, Wilson found encouragement to seriously pursue jazz performance and moved to New York City the following year.
Musical association with M-Base
In New York, Wilson's focus turned towards improvisation. Heavily influenced by singers Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, she fine-tuned her vocal phrasing and scat while studying ear training with trombonist Grachan Moncur, III. Frequenting jam sessions under the tutelage of pianist Sadik Hakim, a Charlie Parker alumnus, she met alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, who encouraged her to look beyond the standard jazz repertoire in favor of developing original material. She would become the vocalist and one of the founding members of the M-Base collective in which Coleman was the leading figure, a stylistic outgrowth of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and Black Artists Group (BAG) that re-imagined the grooves of funk and soul within the context of traditional and avant-garde jazz. Peter Watrous in an article for The New York Times states:
The M-Base group in Brooklyn, working with both jazz and pop forms, makes music that at first sounds like funk from the 1970s. Like the music played by Mr. Marsalis (and his brother Wynton) the music made by M-Base - Steve Coleman, with Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson and Geri Allen – is, at its best, filled with subtle ideas working behind the mask of popular music. In Mr. Coleman's group a singer is supported by an electric bass, guitar, drums and electric keyboards, a shiny musical mix that has familiar rock and funk references; yet, because of all its rhythmic and metric manipulations, sounds new.[7]
Although the voice – typically treated as the focal point of any arrangement in which it is included – was not an obvious choice for M-Base's complex textures or harmonically elaborated melodies, Wilson wove herself into the fabric of these settings with wordless improv and lyrics. She can be heard on Coleman's debut as a leader Motherland Pulse (1985), then as member of his Five Elements on On the Edge of Tomorrow (1986), World Expansion (1986), Sine Die (1987), and on M-Base Collective's sole recording as a large ensemble Anatomy of a Groove (1992).
At the same time, Wilson toured with avant-garde trio New Air featuring alto saxophonist Henry Threadgill and recorded Air Show No. 1 (1987) in Italy. A decade her senior and an AACM member, Threadgill has been lauded as a composer for his ability to transcend stylistic boundaries, a trait he and Wilson share.
Solo career
Like fellow M-Base artists, Wilson signed to the Munich-based, independent label JMT. She released her first recording as a leader Point of View in 1986. Like the majority of her JMT albums that followed, originals by Wilson in keeping with M-Base dominated these sessions; she would also record material by and co-written with Coleman, Jean-Paul Bourelly, and James Weidman as well as a few standards. Her throaty contralto gradually emerges over the course of these recordings, making its way to the foreground. She developed a remarkable ability to stretch and bend pitches, elongate syllables, manipulate tone and timbre from dusky to hollow.[8]
While these recordings established her as a serious musician, Wilson received her first broad critical acclaim for the album of standards recorded in the middle of this period, Blue Skies (1988). Her signing with Blue Note Records in 1993 marked a crucial turning point in her career and major breakthrough to audiences beyond jazz with albums selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies.
Beginning with Blue Light 'Til Dawn (1993) her repertoire moved towards a broad synthesis of blues, pop, jazz, world music, and country. Although she continued to perform originals and standards, she adopted songs as diverse as Robert Johnson's "Come On in My Kitchen", Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow", The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville", and Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry".
Wilson's 1996 album New Moon Daughter won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.[3] In 1997, she recorded and toured as a featured vocalist with Wynton Marsalis' Pulitzer Prize winning composition, Blood on the Fields.
Miles Davis was one of Wilson's greatest influences. In 1989, Wilson performed as the opening act for Davis at the JVC Jazz Festival in Chicago. In 1999 she produced Traveling Miles as a tribute to Davis. The album developed from a series of jazz concerts that she performed at Lincoln Center in November 1997 in Davis' honor, and includes three selections based on Davis' own compositions, from which Wilson adapted the original themes.
Personal life
Wilson was married to Anthony Wilson from 1981 to 1983.[9]
She has a son, Jeris, born in the late 1980s. Her song "Out Loud (Jeris' Blues)" on the album She Who Weeps is dedicated to him. For many years she and her son lived in New York City's Sugar Hill, in an apartment that once belonged to Count Basie, Lena Horne and the boxer Joe Louis.[10]
From 2000 to 2003 Wilson was married to actor Isaach de Bankolé, who directed her in the concert film Traveling Miles: Cassandra Wilson (2000).[11]
Wilson and her mother are members of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.[12][13]
Awards and honors
- 1994–1996: Female Jazz Vocalist of the Year, Down Beat
- 1997: Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, New Moon Daughter[3]
- 1999: Miles Davis Prize, Montreal International Jazz Festival
- 2001: "America's Best Singer", Time[3]
- 2003: Honorary doctorate in the Arts, Millsaps College
- 2009: Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, Loverly
- 2010: Added to Mississippi Blues Trail[14]
- 2010: Best Vocal Album, NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll 2010, Silver Pony
- 2011: Best Traditional Jazz Album, BET Soul Train Award, Silver Pony
- 2015: Honorary doctorate in Fine Arts, The New School
- 2015: Spirit of Ireland Award, Irish Arts Centre
- 2020: Honorary doctorate in Music, Berklee College of Music
Discography
As leader
- Point of View (JMT, 1986)
- Days Aweigh (JMT, 1987)
- Blue Skies (JMT, 1988)
- Jumpworld (JMT, 1990)
- Live (JMT, 1991)
- She Who Weeps (JMT, 1991)
- Dance to the Drums Again (DIW, 1992)
- After the Beginning Again (JMT, 1992)
- Blue Light 'til Dawn (Blue Note, 1993)
- New Moon Daughter (Blue Note, 1995)
- Rendezvous with Jacky Terrasson (Blue Note, 1997)
- Traveling Miles (Blue Note, 1999)
- Belly of the Sun (Blue Note, 2002)
- Glamoured (Blue Note, 2003)
- Thunderbird (Blue Note, 2006)
- Loverly (Blue Note, 2008)
- Silver Pony (Blue Note, 2010)
- Another Country (eOne, 2012)[15])
- Coming Forth by Day (Legacy, 2015)[16]
Compilations
- Songbook (JMT, 1995)
- Sings Standards (Verve, 2002)
- Love Phases Dimensions: From the JMT Years (Edel, 2004)
- Closer to You: The Pop Side (Blue Note, 2009)
- 5 Original Albums (Blue Note, 2018)
As guest
With Steve Coleman
- Motherland Pulse (JMT, 1985)
- On the Edge of Tomorrow (JMT, 1986)
- World Expansion (JMT, 1987)
- Sine Die (Pangaea, 1988)
- Rhythm People (The Resurrection of Creative Black Civilization) (RCA, 1990)
- Black Science (Novus, 1991)
- Drop Kick (Novus, 1992)
- The Ascension to Light (BMG France, 1999)
With Wynton Marsalis
- Blood on the Fields (Columbia, 1997)
- Reeltime (Sony, 1999)
With The Roots
- Do You Want More?!!!??! (DGC, 1994)
- Illadelph Halflife (DGC, 1996)
With others
- New Air, Air Show No. 1 (Black Saint, 1986)
- Don Byron, A Fine Line: Arias & Lieder (Blue Note, 2000)
- Terence Blanchard, Let's Get Lost (Sony, 2001)
- Terri Lyne Carrington, The Mosaic Project (Concord Jazz, 2011)
- Regina Carter, Rhythms of the Heart (Verve, 1999)
- Olu Dara, Neighborhoods (Atlantic, 2001)
- Kurt Elling, The Messenger (Blue Note, 1997)
- Robin Eubanks, Karma (JMT, 1991)
- Bill Frisell & Elvis Costello, The Sweetest Punch (Decca, 1999)
- Charlie Haden Quartet West, Sophisticated Ladies (EmArcy, 2010)
- Dave Holland, Dream of the Elders (ECM, 1995)
- Javon Jackson, A Look Within (Blue Note, 1996)
- Angelique Kidjo, Oremi (Island, 1998)
- M-Base Collective, Anatomy of a Groove (Columbia, 1992)
- David Murray Black Saint Quartet, Sacred Ground (Justin Time, 2007)
- Meshell Ndegeocello, The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel (Shanachie, 2005)
- Greg Osby, Season of Renewal (JMT, 1990)
- Courtney Pine, Modern Day Jazz Stories (Antilles, 1995)
- David Sanchez, Street Scenes (Columbia, 1996)
- Steve Turre, Steve Turre (Verve, 1997)
- Luther Vandross, I Know (EMI, 1998)
- Count Basie Orchestra, Ella 100: Live at the Apollo! (Concord, 2020)
External links
- Official website
- Cassandra Wilson discography at Discogs
- Cassandra Wilson at IMDb
- Cassandra Wilson at Blue Note Records
- Cassandra Wilson at Montreal International Jazz Festival
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cassandra Wilson.
More Videos
October 8, 2015
Cassandra Wilson discusses the legacy of Billie Holiday and why she chose to pay tribute to her with her last release.
Watch Austin City Limits on PBS
Cassandra Wilson - St. James Infirmary
September 29, 2008:
Cassandra Wilson & her band performing at the 32º Festival de Jazz de Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 17 July 2008.
Musicians:
CASSANDRA WILSON - vocals
MARVIN SEWELL - guitar
JONATHAN BAPTISTE - piano, keyboards
REGINALD VEAL - double bass
LEKAN BABALOLA - percussion
HERLIN RILEY - drums
"St. James Infirmary Blues" is an American folksong of anonymous origin, though sometimes credited to the songwriter Irving Mills. Louis Armstrong made it famous in his influential 1928 recording. "St. James Infirmary Blues" is based on an 18th century traditional English folk song called "The Unfortunate Rake". There are numerous versions of the song throughout the English-speaking world. The title is derived from St. James Hospital in London, a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy. It was closed in 1532 when Henry VIII acquired the land to build St. James Palace. The song was first collected in England in its version as "The Unfortunate Rake" by Henry Hammond by a Mr. William Cutis at Lyme Regis, Dorset in March 1906. Notable performers of this song include Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Big Mama Thornton, Cassandra Wilson, Janis Joplin, The Doors and many-many others. Also guitarists like Marc Ribot and Ivan "Boogaloo Joe" Jones have recorded instrumental versions.
ST. JAMES INFIRMARY
(Traditional Lyrics):
I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby lying there,
He was stretched down on a long white table,
So sweet, so cold, so fair.
Let him go, let him go, God bless him,
Wherever he may be,
He can search this whole wide world over,
But he's never gonna find another girl like me...
Cassandra Wilson - Don't Explain
April 13, 2015:
Cassandra Wilson / Right Here Right Now、Time After Time (1999):
Ocean Blue Jazz Festival in HITACHINAKA, Japan
Cassandra Wilson - Don't Explain
April 13, 2015:
The song "Don't Explain" from the album Coming Forth By Day by Cassandra Wilson. About the album: An otherworldly musical homage to legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915) on the 100th anniversary of the singer's birth, Coming Forth By Day is Cassandra Wilson's moody, soulful new album showcase for contemporary yet timeless interpretations of standards associated with Lady Day.
Cassandra Wilson - Harvest Moon
Cassandra Wilson with Cornel West on MTV
There are three videos on this page:
Published March 7, 2012:
Cassandra Wilson with Cornel West on MTV
There are three videos on this page:
- Cassandra Wilson with Cornel West: Voice as Shield
- Cassandra Wilson with Cornel West: Passing on the Codes
- Cassandra Wilson with Cornel West: Rich, Deep and Profound
Cassandra Wilson - Tribute To Billie Holiday
(Live in Munich, Germany 2015):
salvatore scala
Cassandra Wilson - vocalGregoire Maret - harmonica
Brandon Ross- guitar
Lonnie Plaxico - bass
Jon Cowherd - piano
John Davis - drums
