Creating a genre

Cassandra Wilson may reinvent rock, pop and the blues, but she says improvisation is what makes it jazz: ''It may be difficult for some people to hear, but it's always there.''

By PHILIP BOOTH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 14, 2002

[AP photo] “I think you have to really personalize each piece of music, to give it depth by giving it your experience,” jazz musician Cassandra Wilson says. “Otherwise, why do it?”

Mississippi-born Cassandra Wilson came of age musically when she moved to Brooklyn in the early 1980s. Within a decade, she was being hailed as the prescription jazz needed to get out of the torpor that ails the most beleaguered of American music.

Onstage, she is all that and more. During a 1999 New Orleans gig, Wilson was sometimes pensive, sometimes exuberant during a program featuring music from Traveling Miles, her tribute to the late trumpeter Miles Davis.

Wilson, now touring in support of her new, blues-rooted Belly of the Sun CD, has graduated from acclaimed rookie to accomplished artiste, and the raves continue to roll. Village Voice critic Gary Giddins calls her "the most distinctive singer to emerge from jazz within a generation." John Donohue, writing in the New Yorker, praises her as "the brightest hope for modern jazz singing."

Sorry, Diana Krall and Jane Monheit and even fast-rising Norah Jones, but when it comes to female jazz vocalists, fortysomething or younger, Wilson is the one to beat.

Then why does she mostly ignore jazz standards, instead reinventing pop, rock and blues tunes?

For the Grammy-winning New Moon Daughter (1996) and Blue Light Til Dawn, she reinvigorated material by Robert Johnson, U2, Son House, Neil Young, Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell and Leon Redbone and even did a cover of the Monkees hit Last Train to Clarksville.

Is Wilson a jazz singer, or something else entirely? It's an easy call, she says by telephone from a tour stop in Colorado Springs, Colo.

"My discipline is jazz," she says. "That's what is present always. It may not be obvious. It may be difficult for some people to hear, but it's always there. I don't think jazz is strictly defined by repertoire. That's a little dated.

"Usually you can tell the difference between a jazz artist and a pop artist this way: When you get to the performance, and you hear improvisation, if the record is different, then you can guarantee that the musician is a jazz artist. If they're recalling the same repertoire and singing the same songs note for note, every note, is that jazz or is that an illusion?"

For Belly of the Sun, Wilson again attempts arrest by the jazz police. A particularly melancholy, molasses-slow version of Robbie Robertson's The Weight opens the disc, which also includes distinctive considerations of James Taylor's Only a Dream in Rio, Jimmy Webb's Wichita Lineman, Bob Dylan's Shelter from the Storm and Robert Johnson's Hot Tamales.

Fans of the original versions may or may not make a connection with Wilson's treatments. She doesn't feel obligated to treat material reverentially.

"I think you have to really personalize each piece of music, to give it depth by giving it your experience," she says. "Otherwise, why do it? Someone can go and get the original. You can't imitate that experience. I think it's important to include that (original artist's) perspective, but you also have to include your own perspective."

Wilson used an unusual recording process to find her own interpretations. Joined by guitarists Marvin Sewell and Kevin Breit, bassist Mark Peterson, percussionists Cyro Baptista and Jeffrey Haynes, and drummer Xavyon Jamison, she went to her home state to record.

The singer set up shop at a train depot in Clarksville, the legendary Delta town. The setting helped give the CD its atmospheric, textural feel, as did several of the region's musicians. Boogaloo Ames, the late blues pianist, backed Wilson on an intimate Darkness on the Delta, while several area vocalists joined in on Only a Dream in Rio. Two pieces, Show Me a Love and Road So Clear, were written or co-written by Mississippians.

"There's great lore, great mythology there," says Wilson, who was raised in Jackson. "It is the birthplace of the blues, the birthplace of American popular music. There are so many links there, so many paths, so many avenues that begin there. You've got country music, you've got the blues, you've got rock and roll, the whole smorgasbord.

"Once you are out of familiar terrain, something happens and you have to really depend on one another for musical survival. We got to be really close, and there's so much of Mississippi that I think is absorbed in this music -- so much about the tempo and the graciousness. On the other side of that is the poverty. There's so much about the area that I think the guys were able to absorb."

That experience, she says, was made possible by strict attention to a philosophy central to jazz: The art of creating in the moment.

"I love improvisation," she adds. "I love taking twists and turns with not just the changes but the form. Every day, it's a new moment, it's a new audience. It's a new world from second to second, so let's see what's happening inside of this moment. It's more about the journey than the destination. I think that was why I was drawn to this music to begin with."

PREVIEW: Cassandra Wilson performs 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. $34.50. Call (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045

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