Remembering jazz singer Cassandra Wilson

Transcript

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m David Bianculli. Singer Cassandra Wilson died in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, on September 2, at age 70. She first attracted attention in the 1980s, singing tricky songs by jazz composers Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman. Soon she was recording albums of her own, where she featured a wide variety of material and became one of jazz music’s breakout stars, performing on screen in the movies “Junior” and “The Score.” Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead surveys Cassandra Wilson’s 30-year recording career.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “SKYLARK”)

CASSANDRA WILSON: (Singing) Skylark. Have you seen the valley green with spring? Where my heart can go a-journeying over the shadows and the rain to a blossom-covered lane.

KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Cassandra Wilson circa 1986, early in her recording career, on a tune she’d revisit, Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark.” She was then in her early 30s, showing all the markers of her mature style, the love of a drowsy tempo, a dusky tone quality, the dramatic lows her contralto voice could reach and a sultry persona – also the way she’d swallow an occasional syllable.

Wilson heard jazz singers growing up but began her performing career accompanying herself on guitar in Mississippi coffeehouses. She moved to New York in her late 20s and fell in with saxophonist Steve Coleman’s circle of progressives, who wrote their own music, as she did. That crowd played on her early albums, which mixed standards with original tunes. This is Cassandra Wilson’s “Subatomic Blues” with Steve Coleman on alto.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “SUBATOMIC BLUES”)

WILSON: (Singing) We are like the islands in a stream. So alone it seems, till the day we die, rolling on forever.

WHITEHEAD: Cassandra Wilson from her second album, 1987’s “Days Aweigh.”

Another Wilson song on that one showed her admiration for bebop singer Betty Carter’s rapid-fire articulation and Abbey Lincoln’s philosophical lyrics. Graham Haynes backs her on cornet on “If You Only Know How.”

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “IF YOU ONLY KNOW HOW”)

WILSON: (Singing) Do you recall when every day was a brand-new day? Nothing was in the way. And you could taste every rainbow. You could find a bad gold like it was easy. If you only knew how we’d take a trip. We’d take a trip to Mars and forget our homework (ph). We built the ship. We built the ship and sail all the way to Madagascar. Did we forget our children? Cry, cry for the moon. Knowing the man inside is just a lonely old fool. We’d sing a song for him. Singing was easy. Singing was easy, if you only know how.

WHITEHEAD: Funk and hip-hop were also part of the mix early on. Wilson’s label pushed her to make a swinging album of standards, the very fine “Blue Skies” from 1988. By now, Wilson had come into her own as interpreter of lyrics. With her low vocal range, her high notes aren’t so very high but still have a soaring quality. Her phrases might float over the beat.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “POLKA DOTS AND MOONBEAMS”)

WILSON: (Singing) The music started and was I the perplexed one. I held my breath and said, may I have the next one? In my frightened eyes, polka dots and moonbeams sparkle on a pug-nosed dream. There were questions in the eyes of other dancers as we floated over the floor. There were questions. But my heart knew all the answers, and perhaps a few things more.

WHITEHEAD: Terri Lyne Carrington on drums. The album “Blue Skies” was a jazz hit, and a successful, straight-up jazz career was Wilson’s for the asking. But Cassandra Wilson had bigger ideas. In the 1990s, working with producer Craig Street, she made music seemingly designed to resist categorization as jazz or anything else. Take her chant “Redbone,” a character sketch of a hard-living, hard-praying woman that mixes blues and gospel themes, Cuban percussion and a squirrelly pedal-steel guitar.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “REDBONE”)

WILSON: (Singing) Oh, now, redbone girl’s gone to heaven. She loves her God. Prays every night ’cause she live real hard. Now, redbone girl’s gone to heaven. She loves her God. She prays every night ’cause she live real hard. Redbone.

WHITEHEAD: Guitars would be central to Cassandra Wilson’s sound ever after. Old-school country Blues was another part of the mix. Most of one album was recorded in a Mississippi train depot and an adjoining box car. She got more attention, covering radio pop she’d heard growing up, songs like “Last Train To Clarksville,” “Tupelo Honey” and Jimmy Webb’s country pop classic “Wichita Lineman.”

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WICHITA LINEMAN”)

WILSON: (Singing) I hear him singing through the wires. I can hear him through the whine. But my Wichita lineman is still on the line.

WHITEHEAD: Cassandra Wilson in 2001. Her slow, understated, murmuring numbers had a great sense of mood, and she did a few of those. By the new century, she’d become a bona fide jazz star, filling big halls and looking the part. One album was called “Glamoured.” Her last husband was a minor movie star. In her final decade, Cassandra Wilson quietly withdrew. Her last record, the lavishly produced album of Billie Holiday covers “Coming Forth By Day,” came out in 2015. That year, she moved back home to Jackson, Mississippi, where she was born. While her groups went through some changes over the years, her distinctive vocal style was there from the first, and she stuck to it with confidence. And much as she defied category, Cassandra Wilson was the defining and dominant jazz singer of her time. She was a real original who left us much good work to remember her by.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “CRAZY HE CALLS ME”)

WILSON: (Singing) I say, I’ll go through fire, and I’ll go through fire. If he wants it so, it will be. Crazy, he calls me. Sure, I’m crazy. Crazy in love, you see.

BIANCULLI: Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead. He’s the author of “New Dutch Swing,” “Why Jazz?” and “Play The Way You Feel.” His piece commemorated jazz singer, composer and producer Cassandra Wilson, who died last week. She was 70 years old. Coming up, we listen to Terry’s 1988 interview with Cassandra Wilson. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. We’re remembering jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, who died earlier this month at the age of 70. Wilson was influenced by jazz singers Sarah Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter. But she didn’t follow strictly in that tradition. Her singing was spiced with funk, hip-hop and blues. Terry Gross spoke with Cassandra Wilson in 1988. She told Terry she first got noticed at a club in New York City called the Jazz Forum.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

WILSON: And that used to be a place where young musicians would go to sit in, you know, when they came to town. It’s, like, the place people tell you, you know, when you come into town, if you want to sit in or if you want to get into some music, meet some musicians, go to the Jazz Forum. And there, I met a great pianist, Sadik Hakim, who’s no longer with us. And he sort of took me under his wing. And he really liked me and introduced me to a lot of musicians and actually got me my first gig.

TERRY GROSS: As you started getting more serious about singing and singing professionally, what are some of the things you wanted to learn and some of the things you wanted to change in your own style as you got deeper and deeper into it?

WILSON: For a while, I did want to become more technically accurate, you know, in terms of my voice. I always felt that that was, like, a weakness that I had, not actually singing chords, you know, actually singing changes. If you notice, when a lot of singers improvise, they tend to deal within a very simple universe, you know, when it comes to improvising. And that’s one thing I always wanted to work on, and I still work on to this day is, like, is learning actual changes, you know, singing changes and hearing more complicated types of intervals.

GROSS: You sing some standards, but not many, at least not on your albums. Are you trying to, like, sing some, but to emphasize original material?

WILSON: Yes, I’m heading in that direction. I would like to get to the point where I do all original material. I enjoy doing standards, though. I really get a lot of fun out of it and enjoyment out of it. So, you know, there are people who tell you, well, if you do standards, then you should do all standards. And there are people who tell you that if you do original music, you should do all original music. And I just pretty much paid attention to my intuition in terms of that. And everything that – the standards that I choose, I think, fit inside of, you know, the whole body of work that I do.

GROSS: You sing “Let’s Face The Music And Dance” on your latest album. Did you arrange that yourself? How did you decide to interpret that song? That is one of the songs that many great singers have sung before.

WILSON: Actually, Henry Threadgill suggested that tune. He suggested that tune to me. And I was shocked that he suggested it because Henry’s not really the type of musician who gets into the standard repertoire. But he really liked that song. Everything just kind of happened, you know, in terms of the arrangement. We got into a rehearsal with it. And I heard it very up, you know, and very bright, and finally heard it, like, with a trumpet solo out front. And that’s the way it happened.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “LET’S FACE THE MUSIC AND DANCE”)

WILSON: (Singing) There may be trouble ahead, but while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance. Before the fiddlers have fled, before they ask us to pay the bill, and while we still have the chance, let’s face some music and dance. Oh, soon we’ll be without the moon, humming a different tune. And then, there may be teardrops to shed. But while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance.

GROSS: I want to ask you about another piece on your latest album. And the piece is called “Apricots On Their Wings.” It was composed by Henry Threadgill. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this song?

WILSON: I really don’t know what the – (laughter).

GROSS: Oh, OK. Go ahead.

WILSON: Well, Henry told me that it was – I never understood the lyrics. I mean, and I just had to, one day, I came out and asked him. I said, you know, what does this mean (laughter)? And he said, well, it’s kind of a nonsensical type of a lyrical thing. You know, the words sounded pleasant to him, and they worked well together lyrically, so he put them together.

GROSS: Well, how important is it as a singer to really understand and even relate to the lyrics that you’re singing?

WILSON: Well, it depends on the material. For something like “Apricots,” I just got a lot of joy out of the melody of that tune and just the way it moves. So it was always just I somehow intuitively could feel what it meant and, you know, just from dealing with the sound of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “APRICOTS ON THEIR WINGS”)

WILSON: (Singing) I reached for a star and got moonbeam (ph). I reached for some sunlight, and I got some more gold (ph). I sailed across the Milky Way on a hazy, lazy day. It’s such a crazy way to try and get away. Anyway, I…

GROSS: You do some nice scatting on the beginning of that piece. Was that improvised? Or was that composed beforehand?

WILSON: No, it was completely improvised.

GROSS: Do you like scatting?

WILSON: Oh, yeah, I enjoy it very much. In fact, I don’t really call it scatting. I think that scatting is like – that’s taken from a bebop era where vocalists tended to try to imitate horns. But what I do, I really don’t try to imitate horns. I just improvise and create sounds that are distinctive to the voice. And sometimes it just so happens that they do sound like instruments. But that’s, like, not the initial approach, you know, to sound like an instrument. I like the idea of being a voice.

GROSS: You said before that some people tell you to just sing standards or to sing no standards.

WILSON: Right. Everybody’s got an opinion, you know? It’s like, Oh, you should do this. And…

GROSS: Have your musician friends discouraged you from singing standards?

WILSON: Yes (laughter), in a word.

GROSS: You know, some musicians really think of singers as just being pretty props…

(LAUGHTER)

WILSON: Yeah.

GROSS: …To put in front of musicians. And they don’t really respect them that much. I don’t know. You know, and that’s why I think standards get that kind of reputation, because they’re associated with the things that singers do. Have you found that kind of stuff to be true?

WILSON: Yeah, I think that is true.

GROSS: That there’s a suspicion of singers and standards?

WILSON: I think the distrust of singers comes from something that – it’s based on something that historically is true. Singers tended to move into the music without very much of a depth of knowledge in music theory. And so I think as a result of that, musicians just tend to, like, disrespect singers because sometimes when they get up there, they don’t know. (Laughter) You know, a lot of the time, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not really functioning as musicians inside the group. They’re functioning as simply singers, you know?

GROSS: And do you want to function as a musician inside the group? Is that…

WILSON: Well, I do function as a musician inside my group. Inside of any context that I am, because basically, that’s what I am. I’m a musician who sings.

BIANCULLI: Cassandra Wilson speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. She died last week at the age of 70.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “ANOTHER COUNTRY”)

WILSON: (Singing) I don’t know where we’re going, have no idea how this will end. From the beginning, I’ve been swimming in the current of your skin. The autumn rains turned into thunderstorms. The waters rose. I was drowning in your arms. But when I woke up in the morning, I was breathing, I was breathing, oh, I was alive. I saw another country in your eyes.

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR.

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