CASSANDRA WILSON
Belly of the Sun
Blue
Note
Read
the Jazzitude review of Cassandra Wilson/Thunderbird
When the word got out late last year that
Cassandra Wilson was recording a blues album in an abandoned
train station in Clarksdale, Mississippi, expectations were
naturally high. Would Wilson find a way to redefine the
blues and make them accessible to a new 21st century audience
for whom the Mississippi Delta and its musical melting pot
were so far away as to seem ancient history? Would she reinterpret
standard blues songs or write her own? Would she capture
the essence of the blues experience as she did the essence
of Miles Davis on her Traveling Miles album?
The answers to these questions are on hold,
at least temporarily, because while Wilson did go to Mississippi
and did record some blues, the resulting album, Belly
of the Sun, seems not to be the album Wilson started
out making. But that may not matter at all; Belly of
the Sun somehow captures both the heart of the Mississippi
Delta and the heart of America right here, right now (to
borrow a phrase from Ms. Wilson herself). Already the inevitable
question has been raised of whether or not this is truly
a jazz album, to which I say that Wilson is one of the finest
singers in the jazz tradition we have today and her mixing
of idioms (pop/rock, blues, jazz, Latin) is the sign of
a talent that is more, rather than less than, the sum of
these parts. Like Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters before
her, Wilson's talents are simply too abundant to be confined
to a specific genre. I believe that the spirit of this album
is clearly in the roots of American music, and when one
digs down deeply enough into those roots, who can say where
one type of music ends and another begins?
The opening track, a seductive version of
Robbie Robertson's "The Weight" uses bongos and
bluesy acoustic and steel guitars to convey a sense of heat-drenched
weariness, as does Wilson's delivery of the song's highly
mystic lyrics. In many ways Wilson's version of "The
Weight" conveys the load we carry as a country, both
historically in the area of race relations and now, more
recently, in the wake of international terrorism. The sense
of triumph that the blues often conveys is here, and by
the time Wilson launches into the chorus for the last time,
we feel that a metaphorical load has, in fact, been lifted.
"Justice", an original composition, is one of
only two songs that Wilson knew would be on the album when
she headed down to Mississippi, and it addresses rather
directly the highly current topic of reparations for slavery.
"I'll take that box of reparations/No, not the little
one/I want the big one that matches my scars/it's such a
pretty thing/something I've needed since I came here from
afar" she sings. The poetry is very eloquent, though
I suspect Wilson sees this as something of a personal "Strange
Fruit" (a song she managed to cover despite its almost
exclusive association with Billie Holiday); it's not nearly
that strong and neither is its subject. Still, it is so
refreshing and bracing to hear a jazz singer actually sing
about something current, important, and politically charged
that you have to applaud Cassandra's chutzpah.
To be fair, by the time she settled down to
actually record, the idea of the blues album was already
morphing into something else: "Mississippi is an
almost magical place for music. In addition to the legacy
that's there, great musicians are everywhere. In the smallest
town you can find cats that are amazing players. Not just
the blues, there are also funk players, soul singers, of
course gospel singers, and like my father, some serious
jazz musicians. For the most part the world outside of Mississippi
has never heard of them." One amazing musician
Wilson found was 80 year-old local blues pianist Boogaloo
Ames who accompanies the singer on "Darkness on the
Delta" and "Rock Me Baby". The fact is that
you can hear in Ames' playing a style and feeling for the
blues (as well as earlier piano styles) that you simply
wouldn't get from today's finest jazz and studio performers.
These two performances form the blues backbone of Belly
of the Sun, allowing Wilson to extend into Brazilian
bossa, soul, and popular music without sacrificing the album's
conceptual integrity.
Wilson has been performing Gilberto's "Waters
of March" live for a while, and the song is a personal
favorite. One problem many singers have with a song like
this (indeed with many Brazilian songs by Gilberto and Jobim)
is that they have trouble fitting the words in while still
remaining sufficiently relaxed in their phrasing. Furthermore,
the words themselves carry meaning beyond their actual meaning-it
is often the sound of the words that is every bit as important:
"A fish/A flash/A silvery glow" conveys not only
the visual image, but its motion as well. Wilson is kind
of singer who can be trusted to convey the full depth of
such deceptively simple lyrics, and that as much as anything
defines her as a jazz singer in my book. The song segues
into a rendition of the traditional blues "You Gotta
Move", recorded in an abandoned boxcar because a wedding
party had pre-booked the old train station that Wilson &
Co. were recording in. The South American influence is continued
in a version of James Taylor's "Only a Dream in Rio".
If there's a dud on the album, it is, for
me, Wilson's performance of "Wichita Lineman",
another song she's been doing live. The song just doesn't
have the melodic strength to be performed as slowly and
deliberately as the singer does here. For a version that
not only transcends the song's pop origins but outshines
Wilson's by far, see the Meters' cover with Art Neville
on vocals. Wilson gets right back on the horse, though,
with a powerful reading of Bob Dylan's allegorical "Shelter
From the Storm" that builds in rhythmic intensity.
While the lyrical poetry of "Shelter From the Storm"
and "The Weight" are miles away from the blues
in complexity they do play with allegory and myth the same
way, and it's quite interesting that Wilson recognizes this-it's
hard to imagine two American (Canadian in Robertson's case)
popular songwriters whose music is more informed and shaped
by a reverence for the blues.
With her own "Cooter Brown" and
the folksy "Little Lion" Wilson takes us into
the Carribean and the African continent before getting down
to some soulful grooves with "Show Me a Love"
and "Road So Clear". The panorama is completed
with Wilson's gorgeous composition "Just Another Parade"
featuring young soul singer India.Arie, who (wisely) mentioned
that Cassandra is an influence. It's heartening to think
that younger singers are paying attention to Wilson, not
merely because she has managed to be fairly commercially
successful while remaining highly artistic, but because
she represents all that a singer should be-interesting,
gutsy, engaged with the songs she is singing, and interested
enough in how it all works to put her own ideas and compositions
out there. If, despite all that, all you can worry about
is whether Belly of the Sun is a "real"
jazz album or not, it's your problem, not Cassandra's. The
table has been set and the meal is a sumptuous one. Whether
you partake or not is your gain or loss.
