By Larry Schwartz
Cassandra Wilson speaks in the languid contralto that has won over critics and fans and led the likes of Time magazine to hail her “the most accomplished jazz vocalist of her generation”.
She can be forthcoming. But she weighs her words against the silence. “I think stepping up to a microphone. (Pause). Is something one does with reverence. (Pause). There’s responsibility. (Pause). There’s a duty to give it as much care (pause) and as much thought as you can give it. (Pause). It is an act of worship.”
Clearly, Wilson takes her vocation seriously. But she laughingly dismisses suggestions that she is carrying the torch in the tradition of jazz divas Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter.
“In my day-to-day life, I don’t think about that,” she says. “I’m so preoccupied with trying to figure the music out that I don’t really have time to reflect upon my place in history or all of that. You know what I mean? Music is so demanding.”
She is blessed with an extraordinarily expressive voice. “In great singers there is something instinctive, something almost innocent,” British author and critic, Barney Hoskyns has written, “as if at the end of the day their voices were only ciphers for something altogether more powerful than the representation of what a song ‘says’.”
You don’t have to be a jazz fan to thrill to her work. Frank Sinatra, Bobby Bland, Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Etta James, George Jones, Aretha Franklin. She’s up there with the greats.
“My God. How could you listen to Van Morrison and not be moved?” the singer-songwriter says. I’d heard her sensuous version of Morrison’s Tupelo Honey over breakfast, then heard Joe Cocker’s hoarse take on the song en route to work. You can’t imagine a bigger contrast. What was her approach to covering a song?
“You have to internalise everything,” she says, speaking from her home in Harlem. “I find it helpful to associate the lyric with some sort of personal experience that I’ve had in my life. That’s what makes it real.”
If so, it must say something about the depth of experience: among several covers of the ill-fated bluesman, Robert Johnson, she has dared to take on one of the darkest and most harrowing. Few of the host of performers to record his songs over the years have attempted Hellhound On My Trail, a cry of torment from a man some have claimed made a pact with the devil. “Yeah,” says Wilson, whose version sacrifices none of the dread in the original. “That place is hard to go to.”
It’s a world away from the assured versions of songs such as Autumn Leaves, Tea For Two and Tennessee Waltz on Rendezvous, her recent collaborative album with Jacky Terrasson. Had she found some special empathy with the French-American pianist? “Well, yeah. I don’t think we could have done it if there wasn’t. It’s kind of difficult to work with musicians you don’t have a feeling for.”
Was there a conscious decision to move closer to a more conventional jazz than on previous albums? “Mmm. Well, projects happen. You’ve got to follow the flow of things.” The new album is regarded in some quarters as Wilson’s best since 1993’s Blue Light ’til Dawn, the first of two that juxtaposed her strong original compositions with covers of songs associated with artists as diverse as Morrison, Hank Williams, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Hoagy Carmichael and the Monkees.
The quality of Wilson’s vocals and an eclectic choice of material has made her the biggest selling contemporary artist for the jazz label, Blue Note.
Her recent albums have proved to be among the most popular since saxophonist John Coltrane’s Blue Train (1957) on a label that has brought us great names from Art Blakey to Joe Henderson, Johnny Griffin, Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard.
If Wilson has stepped “beyond the jazz ghetto”, as one writer has put it, she has done so on her own terms.
“Not since Billie Holiday has a jazz singer criss-crossed the boundaries between jazz and pop with such reverence and authenticity,” John Ephland, editor of the eminent jazz journal, Down Beat, has written.
Among the most compelling covers on the 1996 album, New Moon Daughter, was Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s indictment of lynch-mob era American south. Had racism been a significant part of Wilson’s experience of childhood in the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi?
“I think racism continues to be part of it,” says the singer, who moved to New Orleans in the early 1980s and then to New York, where she has worked with Brooklyn
collective M-Base and collaborated with producer Craig Street. “We haven’t really worked our way through it as a culture.”
Wilson attributes her diverse taste partly to being raised in a home where an abundance of music was available. “Well, the wonderful thing about growing up in my home was that you heard all kinds of music,” she says. “My mother was partial to Motown. I, of course, listened to Motown and the Philly sound and the Memphis thing. My father was a jazz musician. There was classical music in the home. We listened to a lot of different kinds of things.”
I wondered if her girlhood friends might have thought jazz was old hat. “Some of my friends, yeah. Some of them definitely understand what jazz comes from and how it’s
important. The importance of keeping that tradition alive …”
She learned to play piano and guitar and has been writing songs since her early teens. “It comes in a variety of ways. Sometimes it comes on the piano, sometimes it comes from singing around the house. Sometimes it comes on the guitar. I never know how it will come. It depends on what instrument I pick up.”
For all her technical facility, she has an intuitive approach to her music. “Music is always for me visceral,” she says. “When I began the process of making music, sometimes, some point in the process, I’m dipping to examine technically what’s happening here. You know, how is this moving? What kinds of intervals are being used? What is the shape of the piece?
And that’s mostly done because I want to communicate it to other musicians. Not because of the way I communicate it to an audience.”
On her first visit to Australia, Wilson will be backed by a quartet (piano, guitar, drums, bass). What sort of music can we expect? “Well, you know, I don’t know,” she says. “I try to leave all possibilities open.”
The Sunday Age, 08-Feb-1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 