The new jazz singers: next generation of female vocalists keeps the faith with Sarah, Ella, Billie

Ebony, Dec, 1996 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

RELATED ARTICLE: Cassandra Wilson Rejects Musical Categories

CASSANDRA Wilson transcends category and defies convention. Don't box her in; don't draw the lines too tightly around her work. For Wilson it's all about the music. She rejects category, calling herself simply a musician. "I don't define myself, I do what I do," she said

And if public acclaim is a barometer she does it very well. With 10 solo albums behind her, critics have crowned her as one of the greatest jazz vocalists of her generation. "Not since Billie Holiday has a jazz singer crisscrossed the boundaries between jazz an pop with such reverence and authenticity," said Down Beat magazine, which has named Wilson female jazz vocalist of the year, every year since 1994. Wilson was the first singer of her generation to win this award. Although she would not define herself strictly as a jazz singer, Wilson recognizes the influence that jazz has played in her career.

"Naturally the jazz sensibility is there. It's my foundation. My father was a jazz musician and that was the first music I was exposed to," she says adding that she listened to Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Nancy Wilson. "However, I listen to all kinds of music, R&B, folk, blues, everything."

Her latest CD, New Moon Daughter, is an eclectic blend of her many musical influences. Only Wilson could do a jazz remake of Hank Williams' country classic, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and make it sound like a jazz standard.

Her haunting version of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" puts a listener in the moon of the pre-Civil Rights era when Southern trees bloomed with the bodies of lynched Black people. She said the song was particularly difficult for her to do. "But the emotions are real, and song are right, that's what they can do. They work on sense memory. They work on you spiritually. And they work on where you're living."

Wilson said she worried at one time about the "jazz police" who might believe she has turned away from traditional jazz. "I think people tend to forget what jazz was like in the beginning," she said in an earlier interview. "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."

Some jazz purists have wondered aloud at her voice of material. "Of course," she says, "the first thing that I listened to as kid was jazz, so it made sense after the folk music to come back to jazz. And now it makes just as much sense for me to be singing tunes by Joni Mitchell, Robert Johnson, Hawk Williams and the Monkees."

Wilson says she doesn't fight the "jazz police" she joins them. "If you can't beat'em, join'em right?" she laughs. "I've worked with Wynton Marsalis and others, and hopefully there's something that comes from that." Wilson will begin touring in 1997 with a cast performing Wynton Marsalis' epic oratorio on American slavery, Blood On the Fields.