In 1991, after she had been in New York City for almost 10 years, the Mississippi woman known as Cassandra Wilson made a recording titled Blue Skies and set herself ahead of all other jazz singers, except for the longtime giants Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter. With a sensuality too purely adult and far too lyrical to be confused with either the mush or the vulgarity that defines too much popular singing, Wilson remakes standard songs as though none of the lessons laid down by the greats have been lost on her.
Wilson knows how to tell a story and how to twist odd sounds out of her throat, which gives the impression that the emotion is so strong it cannot be held in place by a voice or a note. Above all, she doesn't sound like a child or some jaded hussy given to parading self-denigration as a false form of honesty. In her brown beauty, she is a fully grown woman who has high command of the rhythm called swing, which can easily be defined as the sound of the pursuit of happiness.
She prepared for these achievements in her hometown of Jackson, Miss., where she was born in 1955 and began singing at age five. Her local experience was varied, but she didn't settle on jazz singing until her early 20s. When she arrived in New York in 1982, Wilson worked in Harlem clubs with names like the Red Rooster and Small's Paradise.
A breakthrough came after she met alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, the guru of a group of young musicians in Brooklyn who were trying to find new ways of playing. Coleman got his followers interested in African music, in unusual harmonies and novel forms of organization. "From Steve Coleman," Wilson says, "I learned to tear a piece of music apart and get away from standard approaches. I learned about cycles of rhythm, being able to hear cues in the rhythms instead of chords. And I learned to hear the layering of rhythms. Before that, I had been only studying chords and standard A-A-B-A structured songs. But after Steve, I was able to return to standard material whenever I wanted to and find so many other things to do that I couldn't have imagined before."
It is on those familiar songs that you find her most effective and artistically startling. With that thick contralto, Wilson tunes into the wavelengths of romance in all its bounces, its bends, its heights and its cold-shouldered loneliness. There is no more purely and uncontrived female force in our national music today.
Stanley Crouch's latest book is Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel of Blues and Swing