Pages tagged “cassandra wilson”

Cassandra Wilson uses her voice—by turns subtle, sonorous and sweet—to tell stories, to conjure images, to wink at ironies, to jump genres and redefine jazz. For her, it’s a ministry of sorts, and she’s won all kinds of converts. Time Magazine in 2001 named her “America’s Best Singer,” and a year later—in a glamorous cover story celebrating her as an innovator—JazzTimes declared her “The New Standard.” Even on the rare occasion she records an album of standards, like her new self-produced Loverly, Wilson’s unexpected song choices (“Gone With the Wind,” “Black Orpheus,” “St. James Infirmary”), rhythmic arrangements (“rhythm is job one,” she says) and agile vocals make her work anything but standard. For the new record, she gathered an all-star roster of players—including Marvin Sewell on guitar, Jason Moran on piano, Herlin Riley on drums, Lekan Babalola on percussion and Lonnie Plaxico on bass—and sequestered them in a rented house in her hometown of Jackson, Miss. The noon-to-midnight recording sessions were so hot, they blew out the air conditioning. As Wilson intended, the blues practically seep through the album’s pores.

Sounds of Thunder: Intimate songbird whistles a new tune

Since her 1993 breakout release, Blue Light Til Dawn, vocalist Cassandra Wilson has fused blues, soul, jazz and a handful of other idioms into a unique and powerful amalgam. Unified by her smoky voice and highlighted by her savvy choice of covers, ranging from Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” (done with Afro Cuban accents) to a delightfully dusty take on The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville,” Wilson has spent the last 13 years building a formidable catalog. While her deep voice bears a resemblance to Nina Simone’s, her style shares more in common with the powerfully intimate croons of Shirley Horn. Wilson’s vocal stylings also owe small debts to jazz greats like Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, but none of these legends possessed the front-porch magnolia sound distinguishing Wilson’s last five discs. On those recordings you expect to hear crickets in the background.

Her latest, thunderbird, offers a different sound. Produced by T Bone Burnett and bassist/keyboardist Keefus Ciancia, the recording’s broad, open sound is built around keyboards rather than small percussion instruments and gentle acoustic guitars. A stellar group of sidemen including drummer Jim Keltner and guitarist Marc Ribot flesh out the songs. But the change in music hasn’t altered Wilson’s overall aesthetic; she’s still delving deeply into the roots of the Delta and celebrating its eclectic possibilities. The recording takes its name from the Native American legend about the animal that brought calm and growth to its haunts, and Wilson claims this spirit guided the collaboration.

Wilson’s repertoire still leaps all over the map. She turns Jakob Dylan’s “Closer to You” into a twilight stroll, but she dips into her voice’s lowest registers to wring every drop of sultriness from Willie Dixon’s “I Want to Be Loved.” The traditional “Red River Valley” gets a magisterial arrangement highlighted by dense guitar chords. The record’s centerpiece is Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Easy Rider” which succeeds on the strength of Wilson’s quivering, lament-deepening vocals.

Over the last decade, Wilson—a Mississippi native who lives in New York City—had grown as a songwriter, deftly fusing urban meditations with rural sounds, but on thunderbird her originals seem less fully developed, as if she hasn’t quite figured out how to write for the new band. Burnett’s two contributions, “Lost” and “Strike a Match” resonate more deeply.

Wilson’s new sound may fluster the fans she’s gained in the last 10 years, but that’s been a hallmark of her career. When she arrived in New York, she fell in with the Brooklyn-based M-Base Collective in the ’80s; then in ’88—just when she seemed like the diva of the futuristic-jazz-funk crowd—she released Blue Skies, a collection of jazz standards with a traditional trio accompaniment. The disc became a huge hit. Many of her Blue Skies fans resented her Blue Light... material and the music that followed, deeming it a sell-out. But she eventually won over most doubters. And with thunderbird, she’s poised to do it again.

Complementing her entire career, the title of Cassandra Wilson’s 14th album defies assumptions. At first glance one might think Glamoured is a reference to the trappings of the tired diva stereotype. Instead, it has a more mystical derivation from the Gaelic word meaning “to be swept away.” The word holds deep meaning for Wilson on her latest project. “I read it in a book called Writings on Irish Legends and Folklore by William Butler Yeats,” she says. “The book has these wonderful stories. And the Irish have this incredible love affair with mysticism. I think there’s a direct parallel with life in Mississippi. So I just followed that word and all its connotations.” The result is a disc that continues Wilson’s tradition of uniting varied inspirations.

The record came together, as her work typically does, by intuition. “For the most part, the process is letting the songs find me,” she says. This resulted in an equal balance of covers (Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee”) and some of Wilson’s strongest originals to date. “Once you decide which way you want to go, you just pay attention to whatever pops up. Your experiences become very specific. You say to yourself, ‘OK, you led me here for a reason.’ Sometimes you don’t realize why until years later.”

The new record is her first collaboration with a producer in some time. Wanting to add a new dimension to Glamoured, Wilson chose producer/guitarist Fabrizio Sotti, whom she got to know in New York after the sessions had already begun in Mississippi. “I met him at a club called Sweet Rhythm that’s down in the Village. We had this immediate chemistry and we sat and talked and talked about the record. We got together and hung out and started writing music and the rest is history.”

Wilson and Sotti’s joint effort gives the record a keen focus and a broader textural palette, as heard in the hypnotic rhythm of “I Want More” and in a fresh interpretation of the soul classic “If Loving You Is Wrong.” “My mother played that 45 over and over and over again when I was a kid,” Wilson recalls. “It conjures up a lot of emotions from my childhood. I guess because of experiences I’m having as a grown woman, it made sense to do it now.” Trusting her intuition continues to serve Cassandra Wilson in good stead.