JAZZ FROM THE HEART
Cassandra Wilson captures the spirit of Billie Holiday
On the surface, Cassandra Wilson, one of the great vocalists singing today, and jazz great Billie Holiday don’t have a lot in common.
Wilson was 3 years old when Holiday — handcuffed to a hospital bed — died of heart failure exacerbated by cirrhosis of the liver in 1959.
Holiday had a tumultuous youth: She was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Baltimore, her father long gone and her mother barely present. Wilson was born in Jackson, Miss., to a musician and a teacher. Holiday was dead at age 44; Wilson, at age 38, found her voice and initiated a remarkable run of recordings that seamlessly mixed jazz, blues, country and other American music forms. Holiday sang like a trumpeter played, her voice stretching and slurring vowels and clipping consonants, in a style that changed the way jazz vocalists approached songs. Wilson’s voice and phrasing more closely resemble the bass: low and sonorous, a powerful, sometimes whispery rumble.
Despite the differences, Wilson chose to mark Holiday’s centennial this year with “Coming Forth by Day,” a collection of songs popularized by or associated with Holiday. The differences in their approaches to the songs are stark, but play their versions of the songs back to back and a great similarity arises: Both singers use their voice to add color and nuance to the lyrics. They’re both distinctive storytellers.
Holiday’s high, warbling voice is often imitated these days by pop singers who found superficial inspiration in her unique phrasing. Wilson’s album gets back to the purpose of singing these songs: the opportunity to do something new with them.
“Can’t Explain” opens the set and immediately establishes differences. Holiday’s vocal is full of hurt but also surrender. Her narrator, slighted by a lover, casts the abused as apologetic. Wilson’s version of the song includes droning guitar effects and piercing piano punctuation, with her earthy voice coursing through
the sound. The lyrics are the same, the tone is not. Wilson’s song bears an ominous tone that hints at an intention to break a cycle of infidelity.
Wilson’s choice of emphasis is again intriguing on “All of Me,” a standard that has been recorded in an uptempo manner by iconic vocalists from Billie to Willie Nelson. Wilson slows the song down. A half-century of additional modern music finds its way into her “All of Me”: The jazzy structure is filled with more shapeless musical influences that are droning and ambient. It’s a striking interpretation. Where Holiday and other singers drew out the vowels across notes, Wilson instead treats the consonants like a stream of cigarette smoke. On the wedding standard “The Way You Look Tonight,” Wilson lingers on the anxiety in the lyrics of the first two verses — the ones that hint at abandonment — instead of the reassurance of the chorus.
Wilson sang in New Orleans before moving to New York in the early 1980s. There she began collaborating with musicians who were classified as jazz because there was no better term for their progressive permutation of the form: ’60s free-jazz icon Grachan Moncur II, as well as Steve Coleman and Henry Threadgill, two saxophonists whose inclusive modern music incorporated global elements into jazz.
Wilson made several albums in the ’80s, but she truly arrived in 1993 with “Blue Light ’Til Dawn,” an album of high ambition delivered almost effortlessly as she and an elite group of instrumentalists synthesized nearly a century of American music into something forwardthinking and new. She dug up her Mississippi roots with a Robert Johnson cover and offered tips to the smart song craft of ’60s and ’70s figureheads, such as Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell.
Her journey since that point has been mesmerizing as she continues to develop and refine her signature style. On one album, she put lyrics to compositions by Miles Davis; another found her delving more deeply into the music of Mississippi and some of the musicians (Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson) who were inspired by it. She’s written stirring original material and interpreted songs by Hank Williams and U2, in addition to reimagining standards.
And when Wilson digs into the past for a song, she isn’t reliving the past. Twenty years ago, on her album “New Moon Daughter,” a modern masterpiece, she opened with “Strange Fruit,” a song that will always be associated most closely with Holiday. The song was written by Lewis Allan, a New Yorker who put pencil to paper after seeing a photo of a lynching of two black men in Indiana in 1930. Wilson’s 1995 reading of the song was spacious and rural, colored with minimal instrumentation and included a haunting resonator guitar part played by the late Houston native Chris Whitley.
Fast-forward 20 years, and Wilson again revisits “Strange Fruit” on “Coming Forth by Day.” The lyrics remain the same, but the sound of the songs are night and day. Eighty-five years have passed since Lawrence Beitler snapped a photograph of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith hanging from a tree; a photo horrific for its murders, obviously, but also for the casual and smiling country crowd displaying an unnerving comfort with the scene.
But with music, our memories are sometimes short. Our interest in paying attention to lyrics is sometimes even shorter.
Great songs can and should be remade. Wilson’s new take on “Strange Fruit” feels more crowded and urban than the one she made 20 years ago, one informed by years of additional frustration at having to ask if black lives matter, as the strange fruit is no longer hanging from the tree but rather bruised and battered in custody. The circumstances have changed with the times. But the mood of Wilson’s “Strange Fruit” carries additional frustration and outrage as the song remains essentially the same, just told in a different way.