Cassandra Wilson at Tanglewood, 9/6/98

by Seth Rogovoy

(LENOX , Mass., Sept 08, 1998) -- Cassandra Wilson demonstrated why she is widely considered the heir-apparent to Betty Carter and, as such, the greatest jazz vocalist of her generation, in a shimmering performance of stark beauty on Sunday night at Ozawa Hall.
Bringing down the curtain on this year's weekend-long jazz festival at Tanglewood, Wilson and her quintet played two sets mixing standards, originals and songs not typically identified with the jazz repertoire.

But such is Wilson's powerful aura that seemingly anything she touches turns to jazz. Lay down a rhythm, toss her a phone book and ask her to read it, and what you'd wind up with would undoubtedly be some sort of jazzy improvisation. From the way she moves to the way she gestures to, of course, the way she twists and turns a phrase, Wilson just exudes jazz.

This was perhaps nowhere more apparent than on her version of delta bluesman Robert Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen." Guitarist Marvin Sewell opened the number with a gutsy slide solo, laying down a pedal point with his thumb atop which he carved out snake-like lines of alarm.

When the rhythm section kicked in you were immediately transported from the delta to the juke joint. The song's deep, pulsing groove was suggestive of the roots of funk -- indeed, the number would morph into a contemporary funk jam at the end -- and pianist Eric Lewis's furious solo found the missing link between the roadhouse and Thelonious Monk.

The glue, of course, was Wilson's honeyed contralto, murmuring and moaning through the mix with deep, dark warning. Perhaps more than anyone else, Wilson fully realizes the ideal of jazz-vocalist-as-musician, whereby the voice is treated as an instrument in the ensemble, both in the manner of phrasing and the tonal quality. Wilson gave convincing proof of this dynamic several times throughout the evening when her tones literally fused with those of her sidemen -- alternately the bass, the piano or the guitar -- and a listener could not distinguish between them.

The instrumentation of Wilson's quintet -- guitar, piano, bass, drums, voice -- emphasized rhythm and color, suggestive of jazz's roots in the blues and its African precursors. As such, Wilson squares a circle -- her music is at once utterly avant-garde and ancient, timeless.

Wilson sings through a dense, gauzy fog of time and color; her technique is impressionistic, her hues are all earth tones, yellows and ambers.

Wilson was a dynamic presence as a leader. It is hard not to think of her in terms of Betty Carter, one of her acknowledged mentors. Like Carter, she is a physical performer, shaping the music with movement and gesture as much as with voice. She is a more subtle dancer than Carter, less overtly dramatic, but no less intense. Her interactions with her sidemen were witty and profound, and again, rarely has a singer seemed to be as much of a fellow musician as was Wilson.

Whether the material was a standard like "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" or "Old Devil Moon," an original such as "Green Dolphin Street," or a Miles Davis-based improvisation, Wilson's approach was to deconstruct the tunes to their melodic and harmonic essence, playing with simple figures and building them back up again into a personal statement rich with soul.

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