Cassandra WILSON
Pop Goes the Jazz Art

By Josef Woodard

In 1993, the evocative jazz chanteuse Cassandra Wilson’s career took a serious upward turn, with her Blue Note label debut Blue Light ‘Til Dawn, an album that challenged perceptions about what constitutes a jazz vocal album. It begins with a familiar enough standard, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” but is graced with an atmospheric, acoustic guitar-heavy production that continues through more pop-identified material on the album, under the inventive production guidance of newcomer Craig Street.
A star was reborn. By then, Wilson had already impressed critics and a modest but strong following with her musky variations on jazz standards and tricky, funky settings owing to the influence of the Brooklyn-based M-BASE movement. The native of Jackson, Mississippi, born on December 4, 1955, had moved to New York in 1980 and started circulating among the likes of Dave Holland, Steve Coleman and Greg Osby, and Abbey Lincoln.
Over a decade after Blue Light ‘Til Dawn opened a world of new doors in her musical life, Wilson enjoys a unique and powerful place in the jazz field, a place colored by pop, folk and blues and an approach both experimental and raw in the studio. One could argue that her approach paved the way for an even bigger crossover success on the Blue Note, Norah Jones. In some way, Jones has raised the bar for Wilson, in terms of how widely her latest album, Glamoured, might reach beyond her existing audience.
Wilson’s jazz roots have been revisited in small and large ways over the years, including a 1999 Miles Davis tribute project, Traveling Miles, which addresses many historical facets of the Man with a Horn’s long and twisting career. In 1987, she appeared in Wynton Marsalis’ ambitious Blood on the Fields project.
Glamoured continues the trend established on Blue Light ‘Til Dawn, giving new clothes to unexpected country and pop material, including Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” (made famous by Patsy Cline), Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” (from Dylan’s country and western album Nashville Skyline), and a recent pop hit by Sting, “Fragile.” Wilson gives fresh meaning and sometimes a new stylistic identity to all of these songs, and ventures into original material, as well. As always, Wilson gives subtlety and moodiness a good name, wrapping her darkly honeyed contralto voice around phrases that take their time and sometimes take unexpected turns.
I began a recent interview with Wilson by recalling a long ago lunch in a soul food restaurant Brooklyn in the middle ‘80s with Henry Threadgill. The then still-twentysomething singer had just collaborated with Threadgill, contributing lyrics to the song “A Piece of Software” for his Subject to Change album, and had yet to launch her own solo career. Little did she know then how the world’s awareness of both this new phenomenon called “software” or the career of the poetic sensation called Cassandra Wilson would eventually flower.

Jazz Hot : Do you stop to look back over the long arc of your musical life, including your ‘80s work for the JMT label, which has been reissued on the Winter and Winter label?
Cassandra Wilson : Well, it depends on what you mean by stop. I think about it often, and occasionally, I’ll use it. I have great memories of that time.

Blue Light ‘Til Dawn came out a little over ten years ago, and it seemed like such a dramatic shift for you. Was there something that led up to that sharp turn?
At the time, it seemed very logical to me. I had been a part of the M-BASE collective and there was so much music, literally so much sound going on around me and in my head, it was time for me to have a direction shift. It happened naturally. It was an organic thing, a matter of sitting back and listening, and having great conversations with Craig Street, who produced that album and New Moon Daughter.
It was a way of opening up the other musical personalities that were there within me.

Did part of that process involve digging back into your own musical roots?
Yeah, that’s what I mean.

M-BASE was such an intense musical collective, and the sound canvases were often dense. Was there literally, for you, a need to air things out and get sparer?
Yeah, there was a need to hear my voice. I look at those years with M-BASE and Henry Threadgill as an essential part of developing my vocal style. I don’t think I could have gotten to Blue Light ‘Til Dawn if I hadn’t gone through those years I spent studying and really developing as a musician. So it was very much an essential part of my evolution, those years prior to Blue Light ‘Til Dawn.

I love your new album, by the way. You keep unveiling the inner beauty of songs we may or may not have considered beautiful. I wonder about this process, which began with your Craig Street-produced albums, in which you redress pop songs in the collective unconscious. You looked at material in the pop, folk or blues world in a totally new way. Was that symptomatic of a new philosophy you developed?
No, I don’t think it was a new philosophy. The philosophy was really an extension of what had happened in M-BASE, which was all about having no fear of getting inside of the material and tearing it apart. I think I had to develop a sense of confidence about rearranging, turning anything upside-down, any piece of music.
Generally, when you do a cover song, there are so many renditions, and perhaps definitive versions that linger in your mind. There’s a natural tendency to stay within the confines of those versions. I truly believe that the time that I spent with M-BASE gave me that kind of confidence as a musician, to be able to look and learn about the particulars of a piece and then be able to abstract and draw the piece into my own personal experience.

Once you expanded on that notion, did it almost become a challenge to take a song like “Last Train to Clarksville” - which you covered on and render it profound, in contrast to our memory of it as ear candy on the radio?
No, not really. I have to explain that it’s not so much a challenge to do something like that, because I’ve been doing it for so long. I love using the guitar and listening to a song and being able to recreate it on the guitar, use my voice and my feelings and different kinds of chord changes and colors to speak the message of the song.
Although you say it was poppish and candy, there was always something about that song that attracted me to it. I didn’t know why until I got inside of it that it’s a very powerful song. The message, the lyric, was very powerful. Actually, the song was written by Boyce and Hart, who were no slouches. These guys were great songwriters. It’s just that that particular take on it, by the Monkees, was for the teeny boppers, so that music was specifically for that purpose. It’s very simple, very clean, with two or three chords, that kind of thing.
But as a jazz musician, when you get inside a piece of music like that, and follow the melody or listen to the rhythm, you can take clues from what’s inside of the song and expand on it. That’s the joy of being a jazz musician. You get to play.

Like John Coltrane and “My Favorite Things.” You’re right: we tend to stigmatize songs by context, perhaps reducing that example by thinking `oh, that’s a Monkees song.’ We might not thinking deeper about the implications.
Yeah. Those songwriters were really great. The song was written during the Vietnam War and was actually about a soldier going off to war. How timely is that?

On your album Belly of the Sun, you do a version of another great song which tends to be overlooked, Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman,” turned into a pop radio hit in the late ‘60s by Glen Campbell. It’s as if you’ve unearthed its hidden integrity. Do you have a list of songs that you’re waiting to tackle and process?
I have a few. They pop up and they don’t go away. They linger in my mind, I stew over them and try to figure out how to get inside of them. Sometimes, I do keep a list, if there’s a song I particularly want to check out, I’ll write it down.

Any you’d care to mention?
Nope. No previews (laughs).

You’re also a good songwriter yourself. Is there a sense that you need to balance original and cover material?
I find that I want to do that more and more. The biggest challenge for me is to feel comfortable and more confident with my skills as a songwriter. That’s perhaps more challenging for me than doing the covers. I really do feel more and more comfortable with it and would love to do more with that. I’m looking forward to writing more songs for the next project.

There’s an original piece on Glamoured, “I Want More,” which sounds as if it grew in the studio. The vocal line seems to sneak into being out of an exotic groove. Was that created in a spontaneous way?
Yeah. I love it. That’s my favorite song to do right now. It actually came at a rehearsal, a couple of days before we went into the studio. It was a welcome addition to the family. It was a perfect song, the song we all needed. I have to give credit to (drummer) Terri Lynne Carrington, who provided the genesis of that.
It’s what happens when you allow for that kind of space. You have to allow a zone for just playing, and then you can build on that and it becomes truly yours.

It does seem that you’ve discovered a new approach to working in the studio, over the last ten years. How do you view the studio, as a loose laboratory situation?
Yeah. I try to make the studio my home. While I’m in there, it’s so important to make it a place where you can let your guard down and a place where you can just lounge and have time to zone out and be free in terms of your expression. I concentrate on providing that kind of an atmosphere for myself and the musicians.

Whereas in so much of jazz, there remains that lingering attitude about the studio - a get in, get it done, get out attitude. Do you think that is a holdover from an earlier era, when jazz recording budgets and technology didn’t allow for slower going?
It is. I think that a lot of the jazz recordings that have been done were primarily for documentation purposes. They were really more about documenting a time or specific ideas, whereas in pop music, the emphasis is so much more on the recording itself, and production values. You have to meet somewhere in between. I can’t imagine spending a year in the studio, but I could also probably do about twenty albums in a year.
There’s a middle ground somewhere in there. You want to have enough time to really relax and get to a kind of familiarity with your environment and with the musicians, so that the music has space to grow and so you can pay attention to things like how you mic instruments and how it’s recorded. It’s really hard to go into a studio in a matter of two or three days, which is what we had to do with the JMT recordings.

What is Craig Street up to these days? Are you still working with him at all?
I worked with him last year in L.A. He was working on a compilation for a television show (“Crossing Jordan”). I sang “The Wind Cries Mary” for that project he was working on. I think he’s still doing a lot of that kind of stuff, very special projects he’s working on.

You pretty much “discovered” him, didn’t you?
Yeah, that’s what they say (laughs). He was working construction at the time. We ran into each other, because we were living in the same building. I had known him from the Black Rock Coalition days (an organization spearheaded by Vernon Reid, guitarist with Living Color and formerly with Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Soceity). My album was the first one that he produced.

Your frequent collaborator and presently musical director, guitarist Brandon Ross, goes back to that period, as well, doesn’t he?
Yeah. I would say that Craig Street, Brandon Ross and myself were responsible for those sounds, the three of us. It was a three-way exchange. Craig was the one who suggested the instrumentation. He suggested revisiting the turn-of-the-century string bands, and the idea of using string instruments. Craig knew about the guitar style that I had, and he would say `listen, sketch the songs out on the guitar.’ I would do that and then give them to Brandon, who would arrange them, based on those sketches.
Sometimes, I would find tunings on the guitar and Brandon would use those tunings to elaborate on the changes.

Has your connection with Brandon been a constant throughout the subsequent years?
Well, it was a constant for about three years. Then he left he band to work with his own group, Harriet Tubman. I started working with Marvin Sewell after that, working with more blues and slide guitar, which was Marvin’s forte. Then Marvin left the band and Brandon just so happened to be at a point where he wanted to do some more work with me, so we started working together again.

Speaking of bandmates, I heard the young chromatic harmonica player Gregoire Maret at the festival in Umea, Sweden, where he was a sensation of the festival. How did you hook up with him?
I first heard him when he was working with Terri Lynne Carrington at Lincoln Center. I was blown away by him. She suggested that I give him a call to work with him. I did, and he’s been with me ever since.

Toots Thielemans is such a huge presence in that instrumental world, but there have been so few chromatic harmonica players with something new to add. Gregoire Maret has plenty to add.
He is so amazing.

Was there something about that sound that appealed to you, as opposed to using a more traditional sound, such as a saxophone or trumpet?
I guess I liked it because it’s so unique in jazz and it’s a reed, but it’s a funny kind of reed instrument. The harmonica is wonderful because you have chords that you can create, or the illusion of chords, so you have almost a mini-keyboard sound happening. But at the same time, it’s a reed instrument. So it can function in more different ways and it can be more subtle.

That’s true. It’s almost like a micro-accordion or something.
Exactly.

You do a version of the Abbie Lincoln tune, “Throw It Away.” I know she has been a powerful influence on you, dating back to your work with her in the early ‘80s. Can you isolate what it is about her that is attractive to you?
I always loved the way she wrote songs about her life, and she impressed upon me the importance of doing that. You can’t just stop with the music of the 40s and the 50s. You have to write music that comes from your time. I always admired that about her, that she was able to write these wonderful, rich songs that detailed her life.
That’s kind of unusual in jazz, for vocalists to write, period. I can’t recall hearing any Sarah Vaughan songs, or songs by Ella Fitzgerald or Carmen McRae. Betty Carter would write songs.

Although she was sort of a category unto herself.
Yes, she was.

People have compared you to Joni Mitchell at times. Each of you have some from different ends of the spectrum, she from pop and folk and you from jazz, and met somewhere in the middle. Is that a fair image?
I think it is fair. I was schizophrenic for awhile. Seriously. I would hide the guitar thing, because none of the cats would understand that. I would just keep my guitar hidden in my house, sometimes pull it out and play songs. But that was something I would never share with other jazz musicians.

Because it wasn’t “valid” in their eyes?
Yeah. It wasn’t considered hip.

Did you like Joni Mitchell’s Mingus period, when her jazz interest came up to the surface?
I loved all of Joni Mitchell’s work. I think she’s an incredible musician and vocalist and thinker. She has an amazing intellect. And she has done some remarkable things with the guitar.

To raise the “what is jazz?” question, do you feel like what you’re doing is in the spirit if not the letter of jazz? Or are these descriptions fallible anyway?
I don’t think the descriptions are fallible. It is definitely in the spirit of the music. It’s very difficult for us to look at the music of your time and really have an objective perspective on it, because we’re still dealing with the great music that came before. It just takes awhile to adjust to that kind of radical shift, from a piano-bass trio thing that has been happening for the past 40 years to something that is centered around the guitar, for one thing.
The guitar has been kind of a stepchild in this music for awhile. Definitely, no acoustic guitars were allowed, but even the wide-bodied jazz guitars were not necessarily welcomed outside of the traditional jazz setting. It’s just a matter of adjusting to that, because it’s still there. This music is still very much about improvisation, and improvisation can also happen with the context. It doesn’t necessarily have to happen when you are creating the music within a song. It’s also about improvising with the kinds of musicians you bring together or the instrumentation that you have.

So you’re working with a logical extension of jazz?
I look at it that way. A lot of people will argue with that but it doesn’t matter (laughs).

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Cassandra WILSON

by Brisa Roché

Jazz Hot : I know Jazz Hot always asks you this, but what is jazz ?
Cassandra Wilson : Jazz is a way of life, a philosophy, an approach to life. It's much broader than repertoire, broader than just instrumentation, it's a way of living in the moment, doing the best with the moment that you can.

Your new record features songs not considered jazz standards, especially by French expectations. What do you think about the classification of songs and musics into categories ?
Categories are created because they help people find what the want easily, in stores. But beyond that I see no use for them. I'm against pigeon-holing artists. I think part of an artist's life-work is to experience and to express. That's a part of the process and you should not limit yourself. If you're a country artist, it's great that you enjoy your roots and that that's your discipline that's how you began but it's important to explore and to grow as a human being. The world is becoming so much smaller every day and we have to grow to love one another, and embrace the effect that the expression of different musics has on us.

So you believe that you could live a moment of jazz through songs by Johnny Cash or Metallica ?
If I took it, yeah. But let me preface that by saying that there's a tradition, an entire body of work and a history that's attached to this music. I don't think you can just walk in off the street and become a jazz artist.

But the history is in you, rather than in the song choice ?
The history is in me, from very long hours of studying the music of the jazz greats, my mentors, the people I grew up around and learned this language from. So it involved many years of dedication to the study of the music. In order to be creative in the moment, in order to abstract you have to be able to access the particulars, you have to know the particulars very well.

Do you mean academic study? Do you read music ?
Of course. I've been reading music since I was six years old.

How important do you think it is for jazz musicians to read music ?
I think it's very important. It's a tool and a way of communicating more easily with other musicians but I don't think it's the most important thing. It's possible to learn by ear and become very accomplished, but I think reading it gives you more flexibility.

And status as a woman in that scene also.
Absolutely. There's more respect for you if you're an actual musician, if you understand chord changes.

What music are you listening to on this trip ?
I have an Ipod, with Von Freeman, Fats Navarro, and me.

You listen to yourself?
Not the old stuff, but I love listening to the new one. I think I listen to it in order to be able to talk about it. Listening enables me to have more informed conversations on what the songs are about.

You're listening to it now as a listener instead of a player…
You have to be able to talk about it to journalists. And it helps me learn about myself, what kind of musical direction is being implied.

Do you have a husband or children?
I have a fourteen year old son.

Have you ever felt like there's a conflict, or that you've had to choose between your life as a jazzman and a woman?
Yes, that's an ongoing conflict. It's very difficult to have relationships because you have to utilize such a masculine persona when you're in that world... it's difficult for me to find men who are comfortable with that.

What do you think about phrasing?
I tend to ignore bar lines. It's more important to me to create the shape that supports the lyrical content and the thought or story behind the lyrics. It's also musical, a pulling and bending, a contraction of time... but the most important thing that it serves is the story. And it's conversational.

What does singing do for you physically?
It's like a workout. I love it. I sweat. It seems as if I'm becoming more active on stage. I wonder what that's coming from, I wonder if it's from watching too many MTV and VH1 videos! I'd like to see jazz become more physical, like that.

What do you do before you play?
We have a ritual. We gather together behind stage together beforehand for five or ten minutes (with the musicians) and talk about crazy stuff, sex, wild things, not even the music... We have an exchange that bonds us before we play. We do that every time.

What's it like to travel around so much?
There've been gaps in my touring, juggling being a mother and everything, and I'm claustrophobic, don't like planes, get nervous and sweaty in crowds... I really enjoyed coming over to Europe year before last on the ship, on the QE2. It's called a " crossing ", not a cruise!

How has the political situation affected your work or travel?
Well, after September 11th, it seemed like music was at a stand still. I do not support the war, and I don't think that the US is doing all it can to avoid this kind of aggression. I'm not happy with the present regime and I can't wait until the elections, when hopefully we'll be able to get a better government in place. Right now it's so retro! But I'm able to disagree, and be vocal about it, and still move around freely in the world. I wouldn't live any other place, or be any other nationality. I embrace the American ideals, and democracy.

If one thing happened that enabled you to make a living at jazz, to eat food and have a child and live, what was that thing or moment?
I guess that defining moment was when I made the absolute commitment to devoting myself entirely, placing all my energy and focus on the music itself, not the trappings of the music, but really serving the music and having that kind of relationship with it, caring for it and it caring for me. Everything began to fall into place once I made that commitment and accepted the fact that I may never be rich or famous, or have the material wealth that you find in the pop world, for example. I still don't feel famous, I still feel the same way I did when I began this, with the same hunger for music.