[Text by Luke Z. Fenchel] Cassandra Wilson, one of the most notable jazz vocalists of the last twenty years, is a singer who plays by her own rules. With her dark and soulful jazz and blues voice, she is an artist who is at once iridescent and tangible. Whether she’s singing tunes by Van Morrison, Robert Johnson, Lewis Allan, Miles Davis, or Hoagy Carmichael, her arrangements always display a mark of individuality, as she simultaneously honors the past and reinterprets it in a thoroughly new way.
That doesn’t mean Wilson is a novelty singer or ever resorts to fussiness. 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.
This Sunday, Wilson will appear for a special engagement at the State Theatre; her newest project, a collection of reworked standards called Loverly is currently out on Blue Note Records.
Loverly fuses modern sonics, African rhythms and sparse approaches to a well-picked selection of material. The result is 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. Essentially, Wilson employed a risk-taking jazz group, and added new depth, texture, and meaning to these songs, without sacrificing their elegance or appeal.
“I wanted to work with spare arrangements this time,” Wilson said, which is 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.”
The result is a collection that appeals to both those who are unfamiliar with the source material and those who have particular attachments to the work. Songs are clearly rooted in traditional arrangements, but Wilson also works on her own terms.
To create the album, Wilson gathered a few musicians to her home in Woodstock to begin work on Loverly. “[We began by] getting together some possible tunes and getting ideas of shapes,” Wison noted.
Wilson says Babalola, a master percussionist from Lagos, Nigeria, was key to those preparatory sessions. “I’ve known Lekan for 15 years but this is the first time he recorded with me,” Wilson said. “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.”
The result is as invigorating as it is inspiring. A shining point on Lovely is the work of pianist Jason Moran, who is Wilson’s labelmate but with whom Wilson had never recorded. “I love Jason,” Wilson said. “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.”
It is in many senses interesting to compare Wilson and Moran, both of whom experiment by pushing the boundaries and limits of their assigned musical genre. If Moran, who performed a brilliant and touching tribute to Thelonious Monk last month at Cornell seems to approach jazz by stretching it to its absolute limit, Wilson deploys innovative techniques to expand the language of jazz.
If Moran’s typical approach to a popular standard is to begin a song as a semi classical musical statement and then to veer off on jazz, blues and minimalist tangents, Wison roots her reinterpretation in polyrhythmic African percussion, but maintains a core respect for the song.
Look to that ineffable and harmonious balance at her show this Sunday.
Cassandra Wilson will perform at the State Theatre this Sunday, Nov. 9. Tickets are available online at www.stateofithaca.com, or by calling 607-277-8283. The State Theatre is located on 107 W. State St.