Cassandra Wilson – In Wonderland
Thursday, August 23, 2012
With a voice that’s as seductive as it is distinctive Cassandra Wilson has traversed an extraordinarily diverse stylistic path over the last 25 years, effortlessly gathering soulful jazz, avant funk and deep country sounds without pause for breath.
Bringing together Brazilian, African and Neapolitan sounds Another Country – her 18th solo album and first for new label eOne – finds Wilson at her effervescent best, and inspired, as she tells Peter Quinn, by a renewed and organic sense of purpose
Whether it's Billie Holiday's behind-the-beat phrasing, Shirley Horn's glacially paced ballads or Betty Carter's risk-taking improvisations, the transformational power of the great jazz vocalists can make you hear songs in entirely new ways. And so it is with Cassandra Wilson. Listening to her sing Joni Mitchell's ‘Black Crow’ from her 1993 album Blue Light ’Til Dawn – incantatory, ritualistic, magical – ensures that you'll never hear it, or Mitchell, in the same way. Incorporating jazz, blues, country and folk music, and with a song list that juxtaposed ‘Hellhound On My Trail’ with ‘I Can't Stand The Rain’, it was this album that showed the way for a new generation of jazz singers who wanted to look beyond the Great American Songbook. It was also the album that confirmed the singer's compelling storytelling gift, a strong sense of music being less a commercial product, more an artistic quest.
“Yes, that is the very first thing that it is to me,” Cassandra tells me on the phone from New York. “That was the very first feeling that I had about music as a child. I didn't even think about money. I didn’t even know that people made money. I thought people just made music. I thank my parents for that.” The singer continues to traverse genres in fresh and creative ways to this day, as evidenced by her new album Another Country – her first recording for the eOne label – which seamlessly embraces Neapolitan song (‘O Sole Mio’), west African folk tales (‘Olomuroro’), the music of Brazil (‘Almost Twelve’) and the blues (‘No More Blues’). And in the dovetailed percussion lines of the title track, it seems to hark all the way back to ‘Black Crow’ and the primacy of pulse.
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #167 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...