Jazz byRichard Cook
The dilemma for the contemporary singer is repertory. The silvery voices of the torch-song era had no such problem: there was the great American songbook, an endless resource. But that was long ago, rock has since intervened, and anyone caught singing Kern or Porter is either an old-fashioned jazz crooner or a retro-stylist who somehow equates class with ancient history. In a peculiar way, though, rock itself has become repertorial: so many of today's hits are covers of old pop tunes. History has speeded up.
How should a contemporary jazz singer handle the issue? Cassandra Wilson, the most feted and perhaps the most talented of jazz's younger vocalists, has found a vantage point where anything is fair game. Her recent records cover a range that takes in Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, the Monkees and Billie Holiday as far as song sources go. She is a chanteuse who owes most to the tradition of Holiday and Betty Carter, an improvisatory interpreter and often an inspirational one. Yet she can be exasperating as regularly as she is moving and intriguing.
I called her a "younger vocalist", but she has already turned 40 and has 15 years of recording behind her. She first made a mark as the singer in a circle of Brooklyn-based musicians, nominally led by saxophonist Steve Coleman, which posited a fresh look at post-bop in the early 1980s and how it might forge a rapprochement with newer strains of black music such as funk and rap. There was a long series of muddled, unfocused records for the independent label JMT, with one disc standing out like a beacon in the middle of the run: Blue Skies, a gorgeous set of songs from the pre-rock era, done in the timeless setting of voice, piano, bass and drums. It was all the more entrancing for coming as such a surprise, lyrics such as those for "Shall We Dance" and "Sweet Lorraine" given a striking, head-turning new life. But Wilson almost disowned the record as a direction she didn't wish to take.
Her first album for Blue Note, Blue Light Till Dawn, seemed like a huge step forward. Cannily produced and arranged by Brandon Ross and Craig Street, Wilson was finally graced with sensitive surroundings and a choice of songs which walked the very old alongside the very new (if Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison count among the new). In among steel guitar, violin, cornet and accordion, Wilson's contralto found riveting nuances. She could sound predatory or resigned, and made either posture seem real. She also made you hear the words. But there were, perhaps inevitably, moments when the mannerisms in a necessarily contrived situation - it was more like a hypersensitive rock recording than a laissez-faire jazz session - undid her.
The subsequent New Moon Daughter, effectively a rerun at a lower temperature, suggested that if anything she was beginning to invest in her own hype. But now comes Traveling Miles (Blue Note), a long-awaited tribute to Miles Davis that surely turns a corner for her. Although the record has rather mysteriously sat on the shelf for over a year since it was recorded, it bespeaks great poise and assurance by confounding expectations.
She covers seven themes associated with the trumpeter, adds four rather circumspect originals, and makes one think of Davis while staying at some remove from what his music ever sounded like. Her backing groups are dominated by guitars, not horns: a brass player appears only once. Her voice is recorded in such a way that she appears as another thread in the fabric rather than the dominant sound, and her phrasing is at times almost demure, as if she feels the melodies are strong enough to need only the sparest of embellishments. "Time After Time" and "Someday My Prince Will Come" are startling revisions, but they're also quiet, and impossible to predict. "Resurrection Blues", an oblique spectre of Marcus Miller's theme "Tutu", is the oldest of forms made eerily modern. This is jazz singing that has travelled a very long way.
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