With New Moon Daughter (Blue Note), sultry-voiced Cassandra Wilson may well have locked up the title "Chanteuse of the Nineties." She is the direct descendant of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, with their bluesy pop tunes and wicked jazz feel for the unexpected twist, and can rivet audiences with her languid, curling voice while lighting a room with simmering sexual energy. Following Blue Light 'Til Dawn, the 1993 effort that first joined her with producer Craig Street in an offbeat, smokily atmospheric setting, Daughter is a jazzy intro for people who don't know or care what jazz is. Ever heard anybody scat through the Monkees' "Last Train To Clarksville" over a Bo Diddley beat? Rework U2's "Love Is Blindness" into a regretful whisper? Transform Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" into a throaty lament streaked with echoes of Sarah Vaughan? Welcome to the suggestive soundscapes Wilson and Street have etched, then inhabited to full and rich effect.
Some of us have been waiting for the fortysomething singer to claim some title or other for over a decade, as Wilson's career took zigzags that resolved into a fascinating musical road map. Born and raised in Mississippi, she grew up with the blues, as a teenager, she wanted to be Joni Mitchell or Cat Stevens. (A couple of her tunes on Daughter echo those early influences.) She first appeared on disc with multireedman Henry Threadgill, in an avant-jazz context. A couple of eclectic albums under her own name followed, Point of View and Days Aweigh (JMT), both suggestive of what she would become, neither nailing it down. Next came her involvement with M-BASE, the collective of then largely Brooklyn-based musicians who talked endlessly about revisiting the intersections between rock, funk, hip-hop and jazz, some of them actually lived up to the self-inflicted hype. Then there was the B.R.C., the Black Rock Coalition, a loose organization of black rockers formed by guitarist Vermon Reid and journalist Greg Tate, which tried to shake up the stereotypes shaping the whites-only rock categories of the music biz. Later, she was cast as a mainstream diva on Blue Skies (Verve).
The B.R.C. was where Wilson met Street. As my colleague Gary Giddins says, "Whether you like what he does or not you've gotta admit that her last two records are very much his records." There are a lot of reasons for that, and they go back to the B.R.C. and Street's own history. On his collaborations with Wilson, Street creates not just arrangements but an entire ambience fraught with psychology, a sonic image that's almost three-dimensional. To learn how to do that, he studied Jimi Hendrix (years ago, he did a multipart series on the guitar great's development for Pacifica's KPFA in Berkeley), Brian Eno, Phil Spector, string-band and country blues and hip-hop, among countless other scraps. An academic could call Street a bricoleur and literally mean it: He worked in construction while he searched for his shot. He helped with the B.R.C.'s opening orchestral concert at The Kitchen in 1985, and saw the B.R.C.'s flagship band, Living Colour, hit the platinum ring, then fall apart. And he tried realizing some of his ideas live, like the Hendrix tribute he staged in 1989 at Town Hall.
Via a dozen-odd musicians he's worked with before on mostly acoustic instruments, absorbing their feedback and some of their arrangements as well, Street has dabbed bits of color all over Daughter's soundscape - refocusing his inspirations to yield an insinuating sweep of sonic impressionism at its most literal, and certainly at or near its best. Take the backdrop for "Strange Fruit," the harrowing recital Billie Holiday first delivered about Southern lynching of blacks: It's as dissociative, as disconcerting, as the lyrics, in which die narrator comes across black bodies swaying from poplar trees. Seductive, emotionally deep-blue, yet shot through with diffuse and flickering light, New Moon Daughter already has writers scurrying for superlatives.
Wilson and her old cohort Geri Allen play key roles on Modern Day Jazz Stories (Antilles), the newest entry from Brit-based saxist Courtney Pine. Pine entered U.S. jazz consciousness as a latter-day John Coltrane disciple, went neotraditional for a couple of subsequent discs and then turned back to his ancestral Caribbean roots, probing reggae-jazz connections. Meanwhile, like a lot of younger players, especially in the Britain, where acid jazz first broke out, he's been trying to find a way to make the much-heralded jazz/hip-hop intersection actually live up to its billing. One main problem to date has been finding deejays who could truly improvise along with a jazz group, creating textures and commentary that weren't canned. Deejay Pogo, who's all over Stories, seems to have solved it. He interacts fluidly and - often wittily with Allen (on organ and piano), bassist Charnett Moffett and drummer Ronnie Burrage. Guitarist Mark Whitfield and trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who's having a resurgence as a justly in-demand sideman, serve up extra colors. And of course the leader, who doubled as producer and programmer, wails on brawny tenor and reedily piping soprano sax throughout.
One of the album's most satisfying aspects is its variety. There are a couple of killing cuts that sound like Cannonball Adderley-style soul-jazz updated sonically. There's a ballad that swaddles Wilson's smoky voice with gently winding soprano obbligato and delightful, ironic splashes of hip-hop atmospherics via Pogo. And there are the Trane-revisited cuts, though these are far from neotradoitionalist genuflections - their buoyant energy prevents anything that academic. Along with recent entries like cornetist Graham Haynes's farther-out Transition (Antilles), it makes the case that a jazz/hip-hop marriage can be real. Bassist Mark Helias is pursuing a different marriage, of African-derived rhythms and the lengthy, cantilevered themes he shares with pals like Tim Berne. Growing up in New Jersey, where he played in soul and funk bands, Helias trained in avant-jazz by woring with pianist-composer Anthony Davis and the late, great drummer Edward Blackwell. Like other folks, including Marty Ehrlich [see Santoro, "Music," March 11], who came out of New York's Knitting Factory scene over the past decade, Helias has forged an interesting musical language that, in this period of dollar-dominated can't seem to find an open doorsounds, way into the larger music-biz world. If it were thirty years ago, he, Ehrlich and others would have graduated to the bigger clubs at this stage in their careers, now, since they don't have major-label deals, clubowners are too scared of taking a fiscal beating to book them. There's no musical reason to fear that Helias couldn't attract larger audiences if he got the shot. Pick up either Attack the Future or his latest, the unfortunately titled Loopin' the Cool (both on enja), and you'll be implicated into the crisp rhythms and subtle multifacets - as if Kurosawa's Rashomon were translated into multidimensional beats. The lineup is also slightly askew: violinist Regina Carter, an ace with a yearning yet biting attack who has her own deal now; tenorist Ellery Eskelin, also a leader, whose muscular tone and incisive solos both offset and reinforce Carter; drummer Tom Rainey, a heads-up rhythmatist who never goes for the expected; and percussionist Epizo Bangoura, whose colors and interplay are the group's glue. Along with Helias, of course, who likes his impacted lines to go against the grain of the beat - a lesson he learned well from Blackwell. The compositions are sturdy and nicely diverse, they lift you into joy even when you're just dancing in your head at the Knitting Factory or Dance Theater Workshop. Anyone who's visited La Mama, Dance Theater Workshop, the Knitting Factory, the Alternative Museum, The Kitchen or Roulette in the past twenty years has seen an older couple occupying the best seats in the house. They're at the center of a knot of musicians and writers and fellow scene-followers who stop by to trade quips and pay homage. They are the Stones, Irving and Stephanie.
Irving, 73, has been listening to jazz since he was 16, when he started hanging out at Milt Gabler's famed Commodore Record Shop, the foundation for Gabler's equally famed Commodore record label. Stone saw the big bands in their prime, dug the emergent boppers and then, by his own account, dropped out of music for a while. "It was in the fifties," he growls amiably, "and I was mad at everybody." When he returned to following music, he followed it hard: He'd retired from his bookkeeper's gig at the Sanitation Department, and could devote his energies to music: "Really bad or good, but something off the beaten track that's what I'm looking for, something that isn't generic." That's why he and Stephanie turn out religiously at performances by avant types, who all know and love the pair.
Stephanie's the one who grabs seats and saves them. Married to Irving (she's wife No. 2, he's husband No. 2) for just over twenty years, she met him at a friend's, then rode with him by subway to her job at Montgomery Ward; they went into work at the same time, sitting in the last car to avoid the very pal who'd introduced them. "She was cheerful in the morning, but I'm grumpy in the morning," says Stone. "That's why I liked Stephanie; she's grumpy in the morning, too. So I asked her to go to a Sonny Rollins concert, and one thing led to another."
Stephanie wrote pop songs as a kid, and got a break when an uncle in the music biz called a publisher he knew on Tin Pan Alley. The teenager went to the Brill Building and auditioned. "I was very nervous, of course." Her songs didn't make the grade, but she did land a job as a singer. "I never wanted to do a 9-to-5," she says, "and so I kept going." Working with the hat-check and photographer concessionaires at the New York clubs, she found herself one night at Kelly's Stable on 52nd Street. When the band played "Tangerine" she started singing to herself softly at the bar, was overheard and got her first real gig. Coleman Hawkins was the headliner.
Sylvia Syms took young Stephanie under her wing, advising her to join the musicians' union so she wouldn't have to "mix" with the customers. In October 1944, she signed up with Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, and the gigs unrolled. "I wasn't really much good on piano. All I could do was play chords behind my singing." Still, she worked until the mid-fifties, when she married and had a daughter. "My husband had a day gig, so I thought I should change my ways," she says. "Things trickled off." As did the marriage itself, leading to Stone and Sonny Rollins at the Vanguard in 1975.
"We had so much fun we decided to keep doing it," she says. One night, she was listening to the radio and "heard something that wasn't like anything I'd heard before." It was Charles (Bobo) Shaw, and he was playing at La MaMa. The Stones went, and discovered eclectic "shockabilly" guitarist Eugene Chadbourne. Next came John Zorn, who was emerging in the same performance-arts scene. From there, the Stones chased the spider's web of exploratory sounds coalescing around downtown New York. Once they both retired in 1977, they made it practically a full-time job. "Stone and I have this thing in common. We like things fresh," she says, calling her husband by his last name just like everybody body else. "For a while, it was like they were coming out of the woodwork. Now it's slowed down, but young players are still coming; it's still happening, thank God."
On March 20, Stephanie celebrated her 75th birthday at Roulette, and a couple of hundred friends from the scene showed up to help. As well they should.
Source: The Nation, April 15, 1996 v262 n15 p33(3).
Author: Gene Santoro
COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1996
