When Cassandra Wilson was about to record the final song on her extraordinary disk "New Moon Daughter," her producer felt the moment was so right that he suddenly yold her to begin even before the musicians were ready.
"She did it in one take," producer Craig Street said coolly. "You can even hear someone puting down a coffee cup. I didn't care. The moment was there and I just wanted it."
The song was Neil Young's "Harvest Moon," which Wilson covers with a measured sense of longing. Her warm and rich voice dances with a sparse steel string guitar and is gently supported by eclectic background singers, which are the faint sound of swamp frogs in the distance.
This inventive and in-the-moment approach says a lot about Wilson and the man she calls "the trickster, the saboteur"- a construction worker-musician turned record producer, who has worked a collaboration with Wilson that is as uncanny as it is monumental.
"I'm still trying to figure it out" Wilson said, "how all the elements came together. But it's a mystery- a great mystey."
"There's no such thing necessarily as a folf song or a pop song, its how you do it. What it is is not as important as how you do it and why you do it. You bend time and space in your own way." C.W.
The result, though, is plainly clear -an extraordinary sucess not only among critics but among the public, who bought nearly 300,000 copies of her last collaboration with Street, "Blue Light 'Til Dawn." That's 10 times as many as a "successful" jazz record.
The sequel, "New Moon Daughter," has won over even more ears, with an extra-curricula vist by Wilson on the late night TV with David Letterman and a Laudatory profile in TIME Magazine. Moreover, you hear the mention of her name in the same breath as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Betty Carter and Abbey Linclon.
This kind of attention is pratically unheard of in jazz. But then, whoever heard of a jazz musician covering Neil Young or Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry " along with a dramatically reconfigured standard like "Skylark?" Or taking a song that Billie Holiday "owned"- "Strange Fruit" - and reshaping it into a new possession? Or, looking for the mean truth in the Monkey's tune, "Last Train to Clarksville?"
These are Wilson's gift and they go beyond her stunning contra alto instrument into the realm of interpretation and extrapolation - to a deep place where she finds the music or where she might say the music finds her.
With a deceptively simple and open feel, carried along by bongos, violin or slide guitar, clapping and finger snapping. Wilson conjures up song, stretching and bending not only the notes but the ideas behind then with remarkable intimacy.
Perhaps the greatest elaboration occurs on her own songs, like "Solomon Sang" or "Until," both of which toy with ambiguity, possesion, loss and sincerity.
That she finds such a welcome home on this recording, though, owes to her affinity with Street and to the group of musicians they have gathered for those projects.
" I try to be the channel, the vessel for a good performance. I let the music flow and allow it to evolve." C.W.
Wilson and Street click on many levels, from the varied influences that inform their musicla palates - Armstrong and Bird to Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt- to their desire to take chances, explore the unconventional and get something real out of the material, however far flung.
" True jazz is like a tight wire act- it's like going completely out of control, past the edge, and then pulling it back into control. Anything else is boring," Street said. Wilson puts it this way; You don't want to step in the same steps you already stepped in. There's that fear of becoming mundane."
For Wilson, the past was a series of collaborations around New York with hard edged jazz musicians like Steve Coleman and the M-Base Collective in Brooklyn. Although largely unknown to recent fans, those roots, on discs like "Junp World," are worth an exploration.
Still, she concedes that the context, which jettisoned horns and saxes and piano and replaced them with roots like guitars and percussion, marked something of a return.
It was closer to the world she knew growing up, to a world of folk singers, and a period that included stints in coffee houses playing guitar. she always knew jazz, for her father was a bass player, but there was this other, perhaps neglected, moment as well.
Street said that he first dicussed the project with Wilson when they ran into each other in the lobby of their Harlem apartment building. She mentioned she had signed with Blue Note(this was 1993) and was thinking of doing a disc, perhaps covers of influential R&B tunes.
But Street, a friend for some 10 years and familiar with her background, said:" I just called her on it. That's bullshit," I said. "What about Joni and the Blues, James Taylor and Van Morrison. Why are you leaving them out?"
Although he had produced live venues, including a tribute to Hendrix at New York's Town Hall, Street had never before produced a disc. Wilson, in effect called him out on his out spokenness and asked him to be her producer.
The result has been a collaboration that has taken the jazz vocalist to new regionss whether it's called jazz or not.
Indeed, the boundaries strech so far on these disks, it makes you wonder why anyone would want barriers in the first place.
It takes a certain kind of demeanor to just say, "This is what I'm into and you know, it sounds great," Street said.
"The major improvising artist have always been abble to do that. Whatever they get their hands on they just soak it up. Cassandra has some of that. It's just wanting to be tapped, in a way."
"It's a zeitgeist. The songs focus on the cycles of life, love, hate, alienation nad harmony. The album's title comes from a proverb that says illnes accompanies a waning moon, and a new moon cures disease." C.W.

Source : JAZZflyte october 1996
Author : Samuel Fromartz