CASSANDRA WILSON crafts her melodies in an apartment that looks out over the Harlem River.
It is a space imbued with the past, the same sense of memory that guides Ms. 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 B. Fowlkes, a jazz guitarist who, while millions of blacks moved north, trekked the opposite way; the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, caught on camera 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,' Ms. Wilson said on a recent sunny afternoon. 'There's a line from the film 'Daughters of the Dust,' where the old woman says 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 Ms. Wilson is afraid of breaking with tradition. With nine solo albums to her credit, shehas 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 folk and the blues as well as 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 selections, 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, Ms. Wilson starred in Wynton Marsalis's 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 Ms. Wilson is not fazed by her rapidly 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, Ms. 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 on Edgecombe Avenue because a friend once lived here, and the apartment's rooms resonated with memories of lively parties where film makers, musicians and other artists mingled.
Later, Ms. 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 Ms. Wilson, a painting of a pensive man and a chair covered in blue velvet, spotted brown from coffee stains and cigarette burns.
Compact disks stacked in the corner testify to Ms. Wilson'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 early 1980's, when Ms. 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, Ms. Wilson said she was 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 Ms. Wilson, one must venture across the Mason-Dixon line, to Jackson, Miss., where she was born and raised. There, the patois had the lilt of music, her grandmother brewed medicine from herbs and passed along family history, and her great-grandmother was born into slavery.
There is an earthy spirituality about Ms. 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 fit 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,' Ms. 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,' she added.
She is, at her center, a Southern woman. 'I've been here 12 years, and there are some things about this city I refuse to adjust to,' she said. 'I still speak to people on the street. I look at people. That's why I like this neighborhood. You have a strong sense of community.'
As a child, Ms. Wilson studied classical piano and played the guitar. She briefly attended Millsaps College and then finished her education at Jackson State University, where she earned a degree in mass communications. Along the way, she took time out to play with a blues band called Bluejohn but eventually became a jazz singer. Later, when she moved north, she teamed up with M-Base, jazz musicians with whom she made her first recordings.
Since then, Ms. Wilson's life has undergone many changes, including separation from her husband and the loss of her father, who died last year. He was from Chicago but went south while he was in the military. His was a family of so-called 'blue-veined' people, blacks vaulted into an upper caste because of the lightness of their skin. But while in Mississippi, he fell in love with a dark-skinned Southern schoolteacher, Ms. Wilson's mother, and he decided to stay.
Because her father was a jazz guitarist and bassist, jazz was a part of Ms. Wilson's household. So were Motown and folk music, and she briefly sang in a folk trio while in high school. But she picked up the blues another way. It scented the air, emanated from the soil and in the midst of everyday living, pierced Ms. Wilson's soul.
Ms. Wilson noted the ambivalence many African-Americans feel toward the blues. Even her father, who recorded with Sonny Boy Williamson and played with Ray Charles, tried to shield the daughter he called Little Sis from the blues. She believes his efforts rose not from disdain but from concern that embracing the blues would stamp her as socially unacceptable in certain circles.
'It's something I think about a lot,' she said of black people's relationship to the blues. 'Some people say that the blues places limitations on us, on our experience, on our hopes as a people. Some people feel that it is what provides us our catharsis or maintains our connection with the past. And for some that past is very ugly and very painful. But I think ultimately we have to face that pain, deal with that pain and express it, in order to move forward.'
A sense of the past, of traditions that helped Southern blacks live and thrive, seems to have eroded in the trek north, Ms. Wilson said. The essence of such spiritual fortitude is still there, she believes, but is sometimes obscured by the urban hustle.
Still, she looks for it in her neighbors' faces, writes about it in her songs, tries to pass it on to her 5-year-old son, Jeris. 'You don't have to abandon those values, that culture in order to be successful,' she said.

Author: CHARISSE JONES
Source: The New York Times, Late Edition - Thursday Sep 29, 1994