NEW YORK-- Cassandra wilson crafts her melodies in an apartment that looks out over the Harlm River.
It is a space imbued with the past, the same sense of memory that guides Wilson's spirit and shades her music. It is here that she practices jazz licks and smoky riffs under the watchful gaze of her elders.
They stare from photographs- her father, Herman Fowlkes, a jazz guitarist who, while millions of blacks moved north, trekked the opposite way; the tenor, saxophonist as he jammed in jackson Miss.; her maternal grandmother standing tall in front of the family home down south. "It's really important to keep in touch with them," Wilson said on a recent sunny afternoon. "There's a line from the film 'Daughter of the Dut" where the old woman say something like, 'It's up to the living to keep in touch with the ancestors.' It epitomizes how I feel about what we need to do in order to regenerate." Not that Wilson is afraid of breaking with tradition. With nine solo albums to her credit, she has been hailed by critics as the greatest female jazz vocalist of her generation. But she rejects category, choosing to call herself simply a musician. And her first album for Blue Note, "Blue Light'Til Dawn," belies easy categorization, using folf and blues as well jazz to celebrate love and the preciousness of the past. On the album, she reinterprets songs first sung by Joni Mitchell, van Morrison and Robert Johnson. She recasts the Stylistics' "Children of the Night" and croons a slow, aching rendition of "I Can't Stand the Rain" to the backdrop of a steel guitar. She also wrote three of the album's sections, including the bluesy title tune, and "Sankofa," a haunting a cappella song about the mythical Ghanaian bird of redemption. "Blue Light 'Til Dawn" has sold about 150,000 copies worldwide, making it one of the top-selling jazz records of the year and her own most successful recording. In April, Wilson starred in Wynton Marsalis' epic concert piece on American slavery, "Blood on the Fields." She will sing in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Junior," due out at Thanksgiving; she performs on albums of songs by Van Morrison and the artist formerly known as Prince, and this month she will begin a concert tour. But Wilson is not fazed by her rapid rising star nor worried that she may lose her way on the road to commercial success. "I continue to choose the path I take musically," she said. "And it's not motivated by becoming famous or having a lot of money, or any other pop aspiration." Instead, Wilson said she records "because I have to be heard." "Sometimes I feel as if Cassandra Wilson on stage is a conduit," she continued. "I think music provides a language for us to communicate with each other and to the world of spirits." This apartment that is now her studio was once her home. She was married then, and she and her husband chose this place because a friend once lived here, and the apartment's rooms resonated with memories of lively parties where filmakers, musicians and other artist mingled. Later, Wilson, who is in her 30's but refuses to reveal her exact age, moved next door but kept the first apartment as a place to create and rehearse. There are the necessary tools: a set of drums, a piano, her guitar. The apartment's edges are softened with white lace and pillows wrapped in African cloth. There is a black and white pencil drawing of Wilson, painting of a pensive man and a chair covered in blue velvet, spotted brown coffee stains and cigarette burns. Compact disks stacked in the corner testify to Wison's eclectic tastes, from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf to the Gipsy Kings, And then there is Charlie Parker. She Once fantasized that she was the legendary saxophonist reborn. That was back in the earky 1980s, when Wilson moved from New Orleans with her husband to New Jersey, and she became part of New York's young jazz scene. Asked to describe herself back then, Wilson said she probably striving to be heir apparent to Betty Carter, personalizing jazz melodies with her smoky contralto but staying within the boundaries set by her predecessors. "I listened to Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Nancy Wilson," she said, " and there was a time I romanticized that period and wanted to live through that music." To tell the story of Wilson, one must venture across the Mason-Dixon line, to Jackson, Miss., where she was raised. There, the patis had the lilt of music, her grand mother brewed medicine from herbs and passed along family history, and her great grandmother was born into slavery. There is an earthly spirituality about Wilson, in the way she sashays in cool clothing, golden dreadlocks dangling down her back. It took a while for her to feel comfortable reshaping jazz to better fir her own musical contours. "I have from time to time been worried about the quote-unquote jazz police," she said. "That's the musical community I grew up in. The worry was that somehow they would view it as turning away from the music." Then she came to a realization. "I think people tend to forget what jazz was like in the beginning," she said "It's not a form of music that came out canonized and etched in stone. It comes from people absorbing what they live. So I don't have a problem doing music that's popular. Billie Holiday and even Charlie Parker interpreted what was known as the popular music of that time. I don't see any difference between that and what I'm doing." "Blue Light 'Til Dawn" is about the mating ritual, "my memories of it, and the way I feel about it," Wilson said. It is about paying homage to the elders of blues and jazz. " But it's also about something else -a yearning and a longing to have that kind of life again down south."
Source : New York Times, 1994
Author : Charisse Jones
Copyright Time Inc. 1994
