artist bio CASSANDRA WILSON For thunderbird, her last Blue Note recording in 2006, vocalist Cassandra Wilson explored the outer reaches of jazz with a multilayered sonic approach piloted by pop producer T Bone Burnett and supported by his A-team of studio musicians including guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Jim Keltner. This time, Wilson ventures into another fascinating direction with Loverly, a tantalizing, rhythmically driven collection of jazz standards given new luster with a top-drawer band of friends that includes Marvin Sewell on guitar, Jason Moran on piano, Herlin Riley on drums, Lekan Babalola on percussion and Lonnie Plaxico on bass (with bassist Reginald Veal and trumpeter Nicholas Payton guesting). “I wanted to work with spare arrangements this time,” says Wilson of Loverly, her first full album of standards since her 1988 JMT album Blue Skies. “And I decided to dig back into standards with a small, compact group of musicians. I don’t record the typical jazz standards a lot, but I love them and that’s how I honed my craft. I studied the standards, listening to how other singers put their swing into them. But it’s hard to do standards. You can’t really sing them until you understand them.” Wilson cites an example: “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” which she offers here as a soulful, meditative reflection, accompanied solely by Sewell. “I never really understood the lyric because I hadn’t experienced it,” says Wilson. “I’ve always admired this song and I have a Betty Carter album where she sings it brilliantly. But I couldn’t touch it until I could tap into it emotionally.” Other standard fare on Loverly includes “Caravan,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Black Orpheus,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “Till There Was You,” “A Sleeping Bee,” “The Very Thought of You” and “St. James Infirmary.” Plus, Wilson and co. conjure up a joint original, the grooved “Arere” (inspired by the Yoruban deity of iron and willpower) and deliver a killer take on “Dust My Broom,” a Robert Johnson original made famous by blues slide guitarist Elmore James. Wilson gathered Plaxico, Sewell and Babalola to her home in Woodstock to start the Loverly ball rolling by “getting together some possible tunes and getting ideas of shapes.” Key to those preparatory sessions, says Wilson was Babalola, the master percussionist from Lagos, Nigeria, who has been living in London. “I’ve known Lekan for 15 years but this is the first time he recorded with me,” says Wilson. “He’s a priest of the Yoruban religion and has a vast knowledge of African rhythms and how the rhythmic patterns have been retained throughout the African diaspora. We share a passion for discovering the connections between the rhythms from West Africa to the many places in the western hemisphere. That’s why I brought Lekan into this project. His job was to find that West African drumming pattern underpinning each of the tunes that weren’t straight-ahead or ballads.” Case in point: “Dust My Broom,” which Wilson learned when she played with the Southern band Bluejohn in her mid-twenties. She was strumming on her guitar on the first day of the Loverly recording session, and Babalola immediately identified the rhythm as sakara, the rhythm played on a sakara frame drum, which was banned by plantation owners. “Lekan is an encyclopedia of rhythms,” Wilson says. “He hears rhythms that we’ve yet to fully comprehend. When he and Herlin got together, they bonded immediately. Before we tried each tune, the two of them would huddle like in football and call the rhythmic plays. We all depended on them to find that rhythmic bed.” For the recording sessions, Wilson rented a house in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, and turned it into a studio—bringing in all the recording equipment and then set up shop with her band from noon to midnight for six days. She sought to capture the relaxed nature of the sessions, to give a

360 degree view of what happens. That feeling is captured in the group’s funky, upbeat version of “St. James Infirmary. Another band member who Wilson hadn’t recorded with before was label mate Moran, who was in her band for a while earlier this decade. Wilson says, “I love Jason. He’s my favorite piano player. I love the way he’s so seemingly careless in his playing but thoughtful at the same time. It always seems like he plays as if he’s falling off a cliff, but then brilliantly ends up back in a place that makes perfect sense.” Some of the songs on Loverly were suggestions from Blue Note label head Bruce Lundvall. “When Bruce heard I wanted to do a standards album, he came up with songs that I had never heard of,” says Wilson. “He knows more standards than anyone I know. He made me a list.” On the list were well-worn classics like “Caravan” which Wilson takes upbeat with noteworthy solos by Sewell and Moran, and the rapturous “Gone With the Wind,” with a striking Sewell opening and a subtle groove. It was the first song of the session and features “piano work that’s crazy,” says Wilson. Also on the list were some lesser-knowns such as “Lover Come Back,” which Wilson wanted to deliver in a bouncy vibe of late ‘40s, early ‘50s music. When Wilson was mixing the album in New Orleans, Payton dropped by and improvised over a section. Other tunes include the quiet gem “Black Orpheus,” with Sewell’s sinuous slide guitar accompaniment and Plaxico’s hypnotic bass line; the cool and swinging “A Sleeping Bee,” from the Truman Capote/Harold Arlen musical House of Flowers; the gently lilting “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” from My Fair Lady, one of Wilson’s favorite musicals; and the gorgeous melody ”Till There Was You,” from the musical The Music Man (and also covered by the Beatles on Meet the Beatles). “That song was Lonnie’s call,” says Wilson. “He asked me if I knew it, so then he said, let’s do it this way. What emerged, after he and Herlin huddled, was a Chicago step dance rhythm.” Veal makes one appearance on Loverly accompanying Wilson in a duo setting on her molasses-slow delivery of “The Very Thought of You.” “That’s a song I’ve always wanted to record,” she says. “I love the lyrics and the beautiful melody. This was the very last song we recorded after everyone else in the band had left.” Even though Wilson is credited as the producer of Loverly, she says that the songs came together in a joint effort with her band. “I am the unproducer,” she says with a laugh. “I listen to everyone’s opinion about the songs. Some people say that that is a fault. But I like the democratic approach. I like the input, and then we play the tunes, capturing the energy and the improvisational voices of everyone.”

CASSANDRA WILSON Loverly Blue Note 07699 June 10, 2008

For more information contact JR Rich at Blue Note Records

(p) 212.786.8634 (e) jr.rich@bluenotelabelgroup.com

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Out of Africa: Cassandra Wilson takes a fresh look at standards by going backto jazz's roots

By CHARLES J. GANS

NEW YORK (AP) _ There's nothing standard about the way Cassandra Wilson went about making her first album ofstandards in nearly a decade. On "Loverly," she goes back to the roots of jazz in West African rhythms so she can charta new path to the future.

Wilson, who has always acknowledged the blues as "a powerful influence" on her jazz singing, worked for the first timewith the Nigerian-born percussionist Lekan Babalola, a priest of the Yoruban religion. During one rehearsal, when sheplayed the blues on her guitar, he showed her its "direct connection" with the sakara rhythm of West Africa.

"Lekan has a broad knowledge of the rhythms that really are the basis for the music we play in America — West Africanrhythms that have been there for centuries," said Wilson. "It's interesting to bring these two streams back together again— the West African approach to rhythm together with how we are feeling about it as jazz musicians."

Babalola bonded with New Orleans-born drummer Herlin Riley to come up with the churning rhythmic patternsunderpinning the tunes on the album that were not straight-ahead swingers or ballads —"St. James Infirmary," DukeEllington and Juan Tizol's "Caravan," Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson's "Dust My Broom" and the originalgroup improvisation "Arere," based on an Afro-Cuban chant inspired by the Yoruban god of iron.

"It was fascinating to me to be marrying some very unusual rhythms with these standard songs," said Wilson. "I havealways placed more emphasis on rhythm than on melody and harmony ... because the tendency in Western music is todownplay the importance of rhythm."

The 52-year-old Wilson, who grew up in Jackson, Miss., is anything but your standard jazz singer. Throughout hercareer, she has largely eschewed the Great American Songbook, preferring to expand her repertoire to encompasstraditional blues, pop, country and world music along with jazz.

Her last album, 2006's "Thunderbird," on which she teamed up with pop Americana producer T. Bone Burnett, offeredher typical genre-bending mix of original songs as well as covers of Jakob Dylan's "Closer to You," the traditionalcowboy song "Red River Valley" and bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Easy Rider."

"If I did standards on every album that I did, I'd run out of ideas ... it's kind of a dead-end situation" Wilson said,speaking by telephone from her home in Woodstock, N.Y., where she lives with her 19-year-old son. "It's great music,yeah ... but you have to start to experiment, find your own voice and it's very difficult to do that if you're doing standardsconstantly. ... One of the most important components of jazz is that it embraces tradition but at the same time it has tomove forward."

Wilson acknowledges it's important to have "a strong foundation" in the Great American Songbook repertoire that formsthe core of the jazz vocal tradition. So about once every decade she's released an album of standards — "Blue Skies "(1988) and "Rendezvous" with pianist Jacky Terrasson (1997).

So Wilson was receptive last year when Blue Note label head Bruce Lundvall suggested the time was right to do analbum with "her own take on standards in a very contemporary manner."

"I think she brings the freshest take on standards of any artist I've heard," said Lundvall. "She has a very distinctivesound and style and ... very unusual arrangements. ... To do an album like this and ... and reinvent herself without eventrying is amazing. ... Her style is absolutely her own, nothing borrowed about it"

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Lundvall has served as a mentor to Wilson since first signing her to Blue Note in 1992. For her label debut, Lundvallpersuaded her to go more acoustic and perform her original songs and tunes she grew up listening to by Joni Mitchelland Van Morrison, among others. That approach resulted in her breakthrough album "Blue Light 'Til Dawn" (1993), whichwas followed by "New Moon Daughter" (1996) for which she won a Grammy.

For "Loverly," Lundvall suggested that she choose standards that she remembered from her youth. Wilson, who hasbeen commuting back and forth from Woodstock to Jackson to help care for her 82-year-old mother with Alzheimer's,chose to open the album with the bouncy "Lover Come Back to Me" — a song she remembers hearing her mother singto her with the refrain: "I remember every little thing you used to do."

Wilson and her longtime musical director, bassist Lonnie Plaxico, sought out musicians (such as the stylistically diversemodern pianist Jason Moran) who didn't play standards regularly.

"I think the real story here is what the musicians are doing," said Wilson, displaying the modesty that makes her theanti-diva. "Although I might be singing in a fairly conservative fashion, at least for the first verse, the musicians are doingsome wild stuff from the get-go."

In her producer's role, the singer brought her band down during the hot Mississippi summer to Jackson, where sherented a house and converted its rooms into a makeshift studio.

"I love to get the musicians out of a certain comfort thing that they have ... to get them out of New York City and into aplace that's just totally different," said Wilson. "Jackson is the biggest city in Mississippi, but you're not that far removedfrom a very strong sense of rural Mississippi."

They lived together for six days, working from noon to midnight, tossing ideas around and letting the tape roll to come upwith 12 tracks that sound informal and spontaneous. On "The Very Thought of You," a slow tempo duet with bassistReginald Veal, Wilson briefly wanders off mike and stumbles over a word, but she felt no need to do another take.

"It is not so intellectual, it's not so contrived," said Wilson. "It is so much more relaxed. Sometimes the tape is rolling andthey don't even realize it, so you are able to capture those moments that are unguarded."

For the future, Wilson has had preliminary talks with Lundvall about doing an all-blues album. She also wants to continuedelving into the African roots of jazz.

"I hope to be a conduit ... to facilitate an understanding of the relationship between West African culture, particularly theYoruba. and how much that has impacted who we are in the South, particularly in Mississippi and Louisiana," saidWilson. "I think there's so much we have to learn about our culture and who we were before we came here. I think thatempowers you and gives you a solid sense of identity. One thing we need in order to strengthen ourselves and ourcommunity is to begin to draw those connections and to celebrate that."

____

On the Net:

www.cassandrawilson.com

©2008 Metromix.com

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Music Review | Cassandra Wilson

A Blues Diva in Weimar, Visiting on Her Own Terms By STEPHEN HOLDENNovember 19, 2007

Cassandra Wilson ventured out of her normal comfort zone on Saturday evening to give a recital of popular standards at Café Sabarsky as the final event in the Neue Galerie’s cabaret sidebar to Berlin in Lights, a festival presented by Carnegie Hall. Talk about crossover! Ms. Wilson is a singer who plays by her own rules. With her dark, loamy jazz and blues voice, she likes to make it up as she goes along, even in a recital format.

Times critics and reporters chronicle the festival at Carnegie Hall and other sites.

That doesn’t mean applying frills, scatting (in any conventional sense), or dipping into gospel. Her style, if it can be defined at all, might be described as an internationally savvy deep blues. Each interpretation is a sequence of vocal mood swings in which she is cognizant of the words being sung but not slavishly attached to them. To put it more simply, it is a personal declaration of independence.

Accompanying Ms. Wilson on Saturday was Jason Moran, a jazz pianist with classical roots and a strong touch whose typical approach to a popular standard is to

begin a song as a semiclassical musical statement and then to veer off on jazz, blues and minimalist tangents. His communication on Saturday with Ms. Wilson was intimate and playful.

Richard Termine for The New York Times Berlin cabaret: Cassandra Wilson at the Neue Galerie.

The major Berlin connection was Kurt Weill, the composer of “My Ship,” “Speak Low,” “September Song” and “Mack the Knife,” but there was a nod to the Berlin-born composer Frederick Loewe in a witty interpretation of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” (from “My Fair Lady”), for which Ms. Wilson put on the hint of a Cockney accent and, rolling her eyes, savored the words “lots of chocolate for me to eat.”

Another was the name Irving Berlin, whose song “Blue Skies” began the program and which she treated as a dialogue between positive and negative attitudes expressed in singing that circled around the notes as though she were deciding whether or not to land.

The recital’s happiest moment was Ms. Wilson’s radiant opening statement of “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s fantasy of lifetime domestic bliss. Its harshest performance was a sarcastic, guttural “Mack the Knife,” in which Ms. Wilson channeled the growl of Marianne Faithfull. The only Brecht-Weill collaboration in the show, it suggested that deeper exploration of their catalog by Ms. Wilson might be in order.

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Jenny Bagert/Blue Note RecordsSOUTHERN MISS Cassandra Wilson's 17th album, 'Loverly,' comes out this week.

Section: Arts+ > Printer-Friendly Version

Cassandra Wilson Sets Brooklyn AblazeJazz

By WILL FRIEDWALDJune 9, 2008http://www.nysun.com/arts/cassandra-wilson-sets-brooklyn-ablaze/79545/

E.J. STRICKLAND STARTS BY LAYING DOWN A FUNK BEAT ON HIS DRUMS, INTO WHICH THE PERCUSSIONIST

Lekan Babalola interweaves a combination of bongos, congas, cowbells, an African rhythm box, and otherimplements from all over the world. Meanwhile, bassist Reginald Veal, guitarist Marvin Sewell, and pianistJonathan Batiste concentrate on one single function, which is to slowly stretch the tension of this rising vamp sothat the entrance of the star singer will be even more dramatic. She waits a good long time to emerge, so that bythe time we finally see her, we're ready to scream. The vamp goes on and on, getting ever more intense. Then shefinally appears, in high heels (soon to be kicked off) and an orange-and-yellow sundress, and just as she's aboutto sing her first note — a bass amplifier behind her catches fire.

You've got to hand it to Cassandra Wilson: She certainly knowshow to make an entrance.

This was Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Lichtenstein Theater, the final night of the Mississippi Delta Heritage Project, a month-long performance series produced by 651 Arts. It was also a coming-out party for Ms. Wilson's 17th original solo album, "Loverly" (which is being celebrated again tonight at the Blue Note in Manhattan).

No flames were seen rising from the amp, but a profuse amount of smoke began to pour out of the thing, and those of us in the first few rows smelled burning rubber. The BAM technicians quickly unplugged the offending piece of machinery and whisked it offstage. In the end, the only casualty of the incident was Mr. Veal's bass, which was essentially inaudible for most of the evening. If Ms. Wilson was aware of what had transpired behind her, she didn't let on.

At one point during the evening, she remarked that it was goodto be back in Brooklyn, which served as a reminder that context is everything. Ms. Wilson lived in the borough for mostof the 1980s, which is when many jazz fans first heard her. At the time, she was regarded as the house vocalist with alto saxophonist and savant Steve Coleman's M-Base Collective. The tendency was to associate Ms. Wilson with that collective's"cutting-edge" and often highly abstract form of jazz.

Yet anyone who heard her sing earlier than that wouldn't associate her with far-out or experimental sounds, but, conversely, with the most fundamental form of musical expression that we have: the blues. She was born (in 1955) and raised in Jackson, Miss., and grew up immersed in the Delta blues and soul music, and didn't live in the North until her

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Brooklyn sojourn. Her recent projects, then, represent a dual homecoming: to Brooklyn for the BAM concert, and to Jackson, where she and her band rented a house and set up an informal studio to record "Loverly."

Even though she only sings two straight blues numbers on the album (the standards "Dust My Broom" and "St.James Infirmary"), and added a third for the concert, Son House's "Death Letter," the blues is probably thesingle most crucial element of Ms. Wilson's music. She is probably the only major jazz vocalist working todaywhose primary influence is the blues, which is as much a concept of interpretation as a musical form. In contrastto contemporary pop, where everybody is expected to write their own songs and not sing anyone else's, the bluesis essentially one single song that everyone is required to sing differently. Even something as concrete as pitch isnot a given; one singer's A flat is not the same as another's, and Ms. Wilson's highly personal intonation reflectsthe idea that pitch is yet one more option — not fixed but flexible.

Although she has yet to do a whole album of the blues (are you listening, Blue Note Records?), that concept informs everything else that Ms. Wilson does. This is why she can take some of the most overdone songs of all tme, such as "The Very Thought of You" and "Caravan," and make the listener feel as though he's never heard them before. Granted, there are trillions of so-called jazz singers out there who feel it is a moral imperative to take famous melodies and distort them beyond recognition.

But when Ms. Wilson changes a tune, like Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and, at her best, Betty Carter before her, it may not improve the original, but I want to hear it just the same. Ms. Wilson brings to the Great AmericanSongbook the same degree of inventiveness and musicality that the best blues singers are expected to have.

"Loverly" is only her second original album of standards, arriving on the 20th anniversary of the previous one, "Blue Skies." Likewise, Saturday's performance at BAM was the first show of hers I've seen that didn't include any entirely original songs; the closest was her opener, her lyrics to Miles Davis's "Run the Voodoo Down." Otherwise, she put her emphasis on standards such as "Sweet Georgia Brown," "Gone With the Wind," and "A Day in the Life of a Fool," all songs with an African or Southern association.

Although it wasn't recorded in front of an audience, the new album is the one by Ms. Wilson that best captures what she's like in performance. She moves about the stage while she's singing, and even more so while the instrumentalists are soloing. On "Caravan" one could hear her cuing the rhythm section for her re-entrance ("here we go"), and on "The Very Thought of You," she moved toward the microphone from one end of the room to another. Picturing her doing the same in her Mississippi studio lends the album a gloriously spontaneous feel.

The co-stars of the album are the pianist Jason Moran and Marvin Sewell, her longtime guitarist, whom she nowintroduces as her musical director. Even as Ms. Wilson phrases more and more like an instrument, Mr. Sewell'sinstrument sounds more and more like a human voice — wailing, whining, moaning, using non-temperedpitches and blue notes to create a unique expression.

"Loverly" is nearly perfect, but the concert was marred not only by audio misadventures (a shame, because theHarvey Lichtenstein is a singularly beautiful theater) but by the star's decision to feature another performer,Rhonda Richmond, a singer-songwriter whom Ms. Wilson has produced. Ms. Richmond is talented and shewould have been welcome at the beginning of the show, but Ms. Wilson brought her on at the apex of theevening, just when we wanted to hear more of her. She sang only seven songs all evening. The move wasdistinctly anticlimactic, but perhaps it was entirely in keeping with the overall approach of Ms. Wilson, whopersists in presenting herself as the total anti-diva — bare feet, burning amps, and all.

wfriedwald@nysun.com

Wilson mesmerizes with 'Loverly' Profoundly moving album sums up vocalist's growth By Howard Reich | Tribune critic June 17, 2008

Nearly two decades ago, a suddenly ascendant jazz singer played a long-gone Chicago club, beguiling listeners with her ability to make age-old tunes sound freshly re-invented. Since that indelible 1990 engagement at the tiny Cotton Club, on South Michigan Avenue, Cassandra Wilson has done more than perhaps any female singer to rewrite the rules for the art of vocal improvisation. Though she had played the Cotton Club to promote her first commercially successful album, "Blue Skies" (a collection of standards), even then she was subverting extremely familiar repertoire with unorthodox musical techniques. Jagged lines, unexpected silences, strangely meandering melodies—everything about Wilson's heady performance, and the recording that inspired it, pointed to a musician on the verge of a stylistic breakthrough.

Changed jazz singing Within three years, Wilson indeed would transform the art of jazz singing with her revolutionary "Blue Light 'Til Dawn" (1993) and the comparably radical follow-up "New Moon Daughter" (1996). In these recordings, she gave the modern-day jazz vocal the hothouse ambience of Southern blues, underscored with twangy steel guitar, plaintive jew's-harp and other exotica crying out around her.

Now Wilson returns to the standard song repertoire with "Loverly" (Blue Note Records), a profoundly moving album that in some ways sums up the artistic progress she has made since her career first took flight. Or perhaps it's more accurate to observe that "Loverly" gently touches upon many of the innovations she has brought to jazz since "Blue Skies," subtly using them to re-examine the concept of the "standards" album. For although "Loverly" includes such well-worn compositions as "Lover Come Back to Me" and "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," the recording reshapes this music through Wilson's distinctive sensibility. Listen closely, and you can sense the

spirit she forged working with the avant-garde M-Base collective in New York, in the 1980s; the deep-blues expression she tapped in her "Traveling Miles" CD (a 1999 reflection on the music of Miles Davis); and, of course, the rural Southern aesthetic that permeated "Blue Light 'Til Dawn" and "New Moon Daughter." Recorded in Wilson's hometown of Jackson, Miss., "Loverly" from its opening gestures fuses the past and present of jazz in America. If the medium-swing vamp that launches the first track, "Lover Come Back to Me," instantly evokes the 1930s, Wilson wastes no time catapulting the music to the here-and-now. Only a vocalist as innovative as Wilson would address the song in such unorthodox ways, with slightly halting rhythms, throaty low notes and softly imploring high ones. By the time the band has slowed the proceedings for "Black Orpheus," the musicmaking has reached prime Wilson territory, a realm in which there's no need to hurry anywhere, any time. Wilson floats the melody line here, half whispered, half chanted, the microphone so close to her lips as to make every inhaled breath audible, thereby heightening the intimacy of the occasion. Though Wilson has something significant to say about almost all the standards on this recording, two seem likely to spark the greatest amount of conversation.

Challenging 'Spring' "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" stands as a challenge to any jazz singer, its sinuous melody and brooding lyrics testing the vocal and interpretive prowess of those who attempt it. Wilson ventures into dangerous waters, taking a nearly motionless tempo and performing in an austere, duet setting with her longtime guitarist, Marvin Sewell. Together, they make the piece a lament, Wilson's spare utterances enhanced by Sewell's keening obbligato. Equally striking, Wilson practically disassembles "The Very Thought of You." Accompanied only by bassist Reginald Veal, she stretches phrases beyond recognition, bends pitches to vivid expressive effect and wrings drama from every passing note. Even so, a surprising informality emerges—you can hear her voice recede as she steps away from the microphone, then grow louder as she strolls back to it. It's as if Wilson and her engineers were determined to place the listener directly in her shoes. By digging directly into her musical taproot—the blues—in Robert Johnson's "Dust My Broom," and applying a contemporary sensibility to "St. James Infirmary" and the original "Arere," Wilson does not conform to conventional definitions of standards-only albums. Nor do the harmonically free-ranging work of pianist Jason Moran, who never has recorded with Wilson, or bassist Lonnie Plaxico, who regularly has.

Strangely, the title track proves the weakest—not even Wilson can bring much weight to the cloying "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," (from "My Fair Lady," of all things). Yet the very quality of Wilson's voice—that darkly honeyed alto—lifts the tune a bit. Considering the accessibility of its repertoire, "Loverly" likely will rank among Wilson's most popular CDs. If so, it will persuade listeners to think anew about its weathered songs, while solidifying her position as an iconic vocalist of our time.

Cassandra Wilson: Jazz Roots July 12, 2008

By Suzanne Lorge Over the last two decades Cassandra Wilson has emerged as one of the most celebrated jazz singers in the world—and with one album a year since 1985, she also ranks as one of the most prolific. Because of her openness to experimentation with grooves and repertoire, Wilson's work over the yhas expanded our definition of what vocal jazz is—and perhaps in some ways has called into questwhether vocal jazz has any defining characteriat all.

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The through line to Wilson's work is the masterful application of her profoundly resonant voice to whatever musical undertaking lies before her, be it a Hank Williams tune, a free improvisation or a Miles Davis composition. Every song originates deep in her chest, close to the heart, and her performances

are stripped bare of any spectacles of showmanship. You will find no wounded wailings, dramatic embellishments or abrupt exultations here. And yet her songs are packed with emotion.

There are lots of singers whose innately emotive voices drive their performances: Billie Holiday surely and, more contemporarily, Amy Winehouse, who fascinate for their ability to stand on the brink of destruction and describe the view. In her music Wilson, too, speaks truthfully about loss, not as one who threatens to succumb to it, but as one who can face it down. Thus the “Strange Fruit” she delivers on the Grammy-winning CD, New Moon Daughter (Blue Note, 1996) is not the beseeching cry for justice that Billie Holiday gave us in 1939 but rather the visceral testimony of an eyewitness. To today's listener, for whom real-life lynching is safely tucked away in history's closet, this rendition can be more shocking—and more confrontational—than Holiday's original. In this cut a resolute, but hardly resigned, Wilson begs the question, “Is history really so safely tucked away?” Thus Wilson has modernized the song's message and personalized it for a new generation of listeners.

Loverly (2008), Wilson's seventh album for Blue Note since her debut on the label in 1993 with Blue Light 'Til Dawn (a syncretic mix of pop, blues, jazz and country), is her first all-new standards recording in twenty years. The album represents a departure from the expert but more conventional treatment of standards heard on Blue Skies in 1988; this departure is as much about Wilson's artistic deepening as it is about stylistic choices.

“I needed to have an understanding of what was happening in [jazz] when it was first being born,” Wilson explained. “That led me to Congo Square [in New Orleans] and thoughts about [voodoo leader] Marie Laveau, because you rarely make the connection between the voodoo ceremonies at Bayou St. John and at Congo Square and jazz. We know that that's the precursor of jazz music, but it's rare that you have people digging deep inside of that and understanding what that connection is. There's more of an emphasis I think on the marching music tradition and the European contribution to the music—which is really fascinating harmony and melodies—and they're a very important component. But what I've found in my studies through the years was that there was not as much emphasis on what happened rhythmically and what kind of invention can happen with rhythm.”

Wilson brought her interest in the rhythmic origins of jazz to the table when she and Bruce Lundvall, CEO and President of Blue Note Label Group, first began discussing a standards album. “We kinda had the idea at the same time, the great idea to revisit some of that repertoire,” Wilson said. The basic concept established, Lundvall gave Wilson a list of possible tunes and she worked with bassist Lonnie Plaxico to whittle down the number to those that “really resonated with me and that I could really get inside of and express.” At the time, Wilson had long been working with Lekan Babalola, a Yoruba percussionist originally from Lagos, Nigeria. Babalola's expansive catalogue of rhythmic patterns proved to be the linchpin between the forgotten African roots of jazz and the album's modern American repertoire. “I had been doing a lot of work on conceptualizing the approaches and we asked the question, 'What would this music sound like if we gave it African drumming?'” Wilson said of the decision to use Yoruba percussion.

The Yoruba musical tradition is not new to North America; Yoruba sacred drumming is also part of the Cuban music of Santaria. In the West, Cubans “are the ones who probably held the Yoruba spiritual tradition. They're the ones in the Western hemisphere who are perhaps closest to it,” Wilson asserts. (The only original on the album, “Arere,” derives from a Yoruba song that Wilson first heard on a Cuban recording.)

For Wilson, an African American of Nigerian extraction (”if you want to call it Nigerian—those were the names that were given to those states,” she points out), Yoruba percussion is as much a personal rediscovery as a musical expansion. “It was such a joy and really inspiring to work with [Lekan]. I think that as African Americans

we're always searching for who we were before we came here. And when we hook up with someone like him, there is a certain recognition that happens that you can't really describe. It's such a wonderful feeling to know that not only do you have a history before you came here, but you have spiritual systems, you have art, you have culture, you have a wide array of things that you can draw on—it's like opening another door.”

Also behind one of Wilson's many doors are decades of immersion in traditional American pop music—songs that revolve around the “fascinating harmony and melodies” that support the poetry of the lyrics. On Loverly Wilson does not tamper with this formula: Even on well-known tunes with non-traditional percussive lines (”Black Orpheus,” “Caravan,” “Till There Was You”), the groove provides the bedrock, but Wilson's soaring, clearly articulated vocals are what tower above. And of utmost importance, Wilson believes, are the lyrics, which, like the grooves she espouses, must issue from the intensely personal. “In order to deliver a piece of music, especially a piece of music that has lyrics, you have to have some sort of connection to the story behind it. Sometimes that may take years,” Wilson reports, adding that “all singers will pick songs based on what their criteria are—and for me the criteria are almost always how I can tap into a song and how I can relate from experience in my life to that lyric.”

But clearly Wilson does not experience the standard tunes on her new album in quite the same way as she did those on Blue Skies, where she draws from a more conventional jazz vocabulary and uses scat solos. Or perhaps her relationship to standards, the material on which she learned her craft, has changed—but there are no scats on the new disc.

“I associate scatting with bebop. And there are masters of that—Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Ella Fitzgerald—who...were reflecting the music of the time. They had so much vibrancy. What the instrumentalists were doing was so fresh and new to them that of course it was a contagious kind of thing... They were in that moment. I find that what we're doing now a lot of the time with jazz is still dealing with that moment and that was the moment for that generation. So it often comes across as being too deliberate. It doesn't have the same spark that it did for that generation when they were doing it... We're experiencing that music almost second-hand.”

Determined that this CD would be of its own moment, Wilson took pains to create as relaxed a recording environment as possible for her band (besides Plaxico and Babalola, guitarist Marvin Sewell, pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reginald Veal, drummer Herlin Riley and backup singer Rhonda Richmond). She chose to record the album in a house in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, converting the home's many rooms into a makeshift recording studio, with the control room obscured from sight. “When you walk into a studio you usually have a very strong sense of the control room—it's almost like the Wizard of Oz,” Wilson

explains. “So I wanted to see what it would be like if...the engineers are virtually hidden.” The result, Wilson reports, was a heightened camaraderie and an enhanced conversation among the musicians—and a sense of added intimacy for the listener. At times on the recording one can hear Wilson walk toward the mic, casually, as if she were singing to herself; at other times the jingle of a bracelet, an intake of breath, a rustle of clothing—perhaps Marie Laveau is passing by.

The puzzle that Cassandra Wilson poses now is how to interpret her stylistic shifts—is she taking vocal jazz in a new direction or harkening back to its origins? Maybe these two movements are not opposed, she suggests. “I think both things are happening at once. I'm not living in that time [when jazz began] and I'm thinking about different kinds of constructs, different ways of introducing what was there a long time ago. It's new, but it involves digging deeper, going back to a time that hasn't really been acknowledged.” Until now.

Selected Discography

Cassandra Wilson, Loverly (Blue Note, 2008) Jacky Terrasson/Cassandra Wilson, Rendezvous (Blue Note, 1997) Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light 'Til Dawn (Blue Note, 1993) M-Base Collective, Anatomy of a Groove (DIW, 1992) Cassandra Wilson, Blue Skies (Winter&Winter, 1988) Air, Air Show No. 1 (Black Saint, 1986)

Photo Credits Top Photo: John Abbott Bottom Photo: Paolo Soriani

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Album Cassandra Wilson Loverly [Blue Note]

Artist: Cassandra Wilson Released: 09 June 2008 Catalogue number: 5076992

Review

by Kathryn Shackleton 06 June 2008

Cassandra Wilson is best known for singing originals and unusual covers, but standards are where she started. Loverly was produced in a rented house in her Mississippi hometown, with assembled invited musician friends who got down to the business of recording then and there.

It’s impressive to hear the class and character Cassandra has injected into these 20th century songs. With the help of Yoruba percussionist Lekan Babalola she knits West African rhythms into stripped-down arrangements, featuring Lonnie Plaxico (bass), Jason Moran (piano) and Herlin Riley (drums).

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most is a true eye-opener. Cassandra's voice is so deep and resonant it's tangible, and she tells her story of loneliness backed only by Marvin Sewell's silvery acoustic guitar. He reappears playing ethereal slide guitar on Black Orpheus, supported by Cuban-sounding percussion and piano, under Cassandra's whispered, desolate vocals.

The Very Thought of You, a sublime duet with guest bassist Reginald Veal, features a rhythmic solo and sinuous vocals, but Wouldn’t It Be Loverly is a strange choice. It's polished off skilfully enough, but lacks the spark of originality of other songs on the album.

It is the up-tempo tracks that succeed in turning sparks to flame here. A traddish version of Lover Come Back To Me smears Cassandra's mellifluous vocals across Jason Moran’s wild piano playing and Arere, the only original on the album, is a frenetic fusion of unstoppable, cascading rhythms. On Caravan too,