BET YOU NEVER BELIEVED "Last Train to Clarksville" could ever be recorded as jazz. Why would you? Even if you dug the Monkees in the mid-1960s, you'd have to say the song was a trifle, a throwaway, a cuddly distraction at best. How many possibilities could there be for creative improvisation in brain candy like this?
But damned if Cassandra Wilson doesn't pull it off on her glorious new album, New Moon Daughter (Blue Note). Wilson does with "Clarksville" what every jazz artist since Louis Armstrong has done with silly pop songs. She transforms it into something very close to high art using her own sensibility and skill. Her voluptuous phrasing makes the lines, "We'll have time for coffee-colored kisses/and a bit of conversation," leap at you like a startled cat in a dark room. (Like, yo, I don't remember Mickey Dolenz saying that!) She knows exactly when to fire off a volley of scat phrases, and her spare, sensual articulation does the rest. Put plainly, she nails the sucker, turns it around and makes it one of the sweetest songs of yearning you've ever known. Thanks to her, everyone coming of age in the next century may well regard "Clarksville" as a pure jazz standard.
Don't laugh. Wilson's becoming so famous beyond the jazz marketplace, she may sell enough records to make anything she does both popular and definitive. She's been aiming for the perfect synthesis of pop and jazz idioms ever since she hooked up in the mid-1980s with Brooklyn's M-BASE musical collective that included saxophonist Steve Coleman, pianist Geri Allen, trombonist Robin Eubanks and others seeking linkages between the modern jazz of Thelonious Monk and Miles Dewey Davis with the funk of James Brown and George Clinton. The music they made was more ambitious than successful. But they sensed correctly that jazz, if it is to have any real future with the next couple of generations, needed to absorb more of what was in the contemporary pop-music universe. It was a grail that Davis was chasing when he died in 1991 and Wilson, whose gifts thrive in the shadows as much as Davis', may well be his most conspicuous standard-bearer.
Wilson broke through in late 1993 with Blue Light 'Til Dawn (Blue Note), which sold more than a quarter-million copies the following year. The title alone made you want to dive deep into its contents, which included smoldering yet intimate versions of tunes by Robert Johnson ("Come in My Kitchen"), Van Morrison ("Tupelo Honey"), Joni Mitchell ("Black Crow") and Ann Peebles ("I Can't Stand the Rain"). She keeps her ties with the traditional jazz canon with songs like "You Don't Know What Love Is" on Blue Light and "Skylark" on New Moon Daughter. But she'll only go with what she can sing with conviction, no matter what era the song comes from.
Like Abbey Lincoln, the vocalist with whom she's most often compared, Wilson writes some of her own songs. Sometimes they're soft (like "Until" on New Moon), sometimes they're harsher-edged (like "Find Him" on the same album). As with everything else about Wilson, they resound with the basic elements of the blues. It may not necessarily be Count Basie's version of the blues or John Coltrane's. But if you drop the names of Wilson's fellow Mississippi natives, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters (and, for that matter, Miles Davis himself), you get closer to the core of Wilson's artistry. And let's get real: No one becomes a major jazz figure without a firm, confident grasp of the blues.
Much as I liked Blue Light, I think New Moon Daughter is the real breakthrough because Wilson doesn't just stay with a winning formula. She explores this territory and finds greater room for expression and command. As jazz festival season comes around, Wilson surely will be on the circuit. I have the feeling that this will be a summer of emergence for her the way 1955 was for Miles Davis and 1956 was for Duke Ellington. Catch her live if you can and be a part of history in the making.
Author: Seymour, Gene Article
Publication Name: Emerge V. 7; N. 8, 06-30-96, p.
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