Cassandra Wilson, page 2
Wilson's choice of material also put plenty of distance between her and your typical jazz diva. Along with a handful of her own compositions, she sang Joni Mitchell ("Crow"), Van Morrison (a stunning "Tupelo Honey"), two classics by blues master Robert Johnson and an elemental version of the R&B chestnut "I Can't Stand The Rain" that sounded like it, too, had emanated straight from the Mississippi Delta.Wilson's gamble with "Blue Light" paid major artistic dividends, winning her an audience outside the jazz ghetto, selling more than 250,000 copies and earning a Grammy nomination.
Her just-released follow-up to "Blue Light," "New Moon Daughter" (Blue Note), extends the quirky ambience of the earlier disk. Again, Wilson and Street have opted for a raw, unvarnished sound, going so far as to record in a barn in upstate New York. Again, the arrangements are dominated by acoustic guitar and percussion (indeed, Graham Haynes's cornet is buried so far back in the mix that he might as well have been playing out in the north forty.)
This time, however, the singer and her producer have ranged even further afield in search of material. True, there are a couple of standards on hand -- a minimalist "Strange Fruit," a delicate take on "Skylark." But Wilson delves into the U2 songbook with "Love Is Blindness." She covers "Harvest Moon," which, hopefully, will start a Neil Young boom among jazzers. And her version of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," which tended to wander aimlessly during Wilson's recent tour, now snaps into focus, juiced along by Charlie Burnham's fiddle.
For sheer oddball charm, however, the palm must go to Wilson's cover of the Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville." Drummer Dougie Bowne pounds out the beat on his snare, contending with a wicked undertow of electric guitar. Wilson scats briefly on the refrain, as if to remind us of her jazz pedigree. Most of the time, though, she seems content to go with the flow of this otherworldly production, which suggests John Lee Hooker performing in a Martian nightclub.
"New Moon Daughter" removes Wilson even further from the jazz mainstream, demonstrating that her kind of fusion has less to do with funk than with folk and back-porch blues. Her singing is as elegant as ever, full of subtle asides and half-utterances. It's also a little more subdued -- out of deference, perhaps, to the melancholic flavor of her material. The starkness and immediacy may discourage some listeners, but for those who don't insist that jazz singers invariably put on a happy face, "New Moon Daughter" is a must.
