THE ATMOSPHERE suggests the American South in the wee, small hours of a humid summer night. The music is an unclassifiable hybrid of folk, jazz, pop, blues and country. Listening to Cassandra Wilson's astonishing new album 'New Moon Rising' (Blue Note), one has the pleasure not only of stumbling into an intensely aromatic musical environment but also of hearing a gifted vocalist exult in her continuing self-discovery.
The album's 12 songs, five of them Wilson originals, form a suite of passionate reveries linked by their southern ambiance. Hank Williams ('I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry') comfortably coexists with Hoagy Carmichael ('Skylark'), Neil Young ('Harvest Moon') and Son House ('Death Letter').
With eerie, chiming guitars, stealthy bass, an occasional quivering trumpet and even cricket sound effects, the music evokes the rural outdoors on a steamy moonlit night. Wandering through this silvery world of ghosts and dreams, the singer broods on everything from a lynching ('Strange Fruit') to ancient history (her own song, 'Memphis'). For most of the album, Ms. Wilson sings quietly in a thick, sensual contralto, her voice bending and rising through arrangements that permit an unusual rhythmic flexibility and freedom of invention.
After a decadelong recording career during which she gained respect as an experimentalist who carried Betty Carter's breakdown of melodic order farther into the wild blue yonder, Ms. Wilson, who is now 40, has discovered that less is indeed more.With 'Blue Light 'Til Dawn,' her first Blue Note album, released three years ago, she settled into an eclectic, straightforward pop-jazz style that she wields with even more confidence on 'New Moon Rising.'
If Ms. Wilson's singing suggests a vocal hybrid of Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell, with echoes of Ms. Carter, her personality is warmer, more robust and emotionally grounded. The singing is beautiful without being sweet. Ms. Wilson is no lovelorn masochist. Even the saddest love songs convey an underlying resilience.
Ms. Wilson's biggest triumph is her ability to reconceive familiar songs in radical new versions that don't seem gimmicky when compared with the originals. In her rendition of 'Strange Fruit,' Billie Holiday's signature song, her reaction to discovering a body with 'bulging eyes' and 'twisted mouth' swinging from a tree is one of hushed, stunned horror. 'Skylark,' which floats on a spacey pedal steel guitar solo, is turned into a languid dream of flight. In 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry,' an Irish bozouki and a solo violin give the song a plaintive faraway quality that matches Ms. Wilson's keening vocal. A dramatic 'Last Train to Clarksville' pumps up the Monkees' first hit into a now-or-never drama of embattled lovers biding each other a furtive farewell.
NEW MOON RISING' also finds Ms. Wilson coming further into her own as a songwriter. Of all the musicians influenced by Ms. Mitchell's long-lined folk-jazz songs, none has personalized that style more powerfully than Ms. Wilson. Her two finest songs on the new album -- 'Until' and 'A Little Warm Death' -- recall the flavor of material on Ms. Mitchell's albums 'Hejira' and 'Mingus' without being overtly imitative.
'Until,' the best of the two, is a silky, light samba in which the sound of an accordion filtering through the guitars provides a French bistro ambiance. The lyrics, which reflect on the elusiveness of a love that seems just out of reach, find a perfect balance between easy conversation and wrenching personal confession. 'Until' is the work of a musician who has the talent, intelligence and insight to do it all.

Author: STEPHEN HOLDEN
Source: The New York Times, Late Edition -
Sunday Mar 17, 1996