Cassandra Wilson obituary

Cassandra Wilson, the double Grammy-winning jazz vocalist and songwriter who has died aged 70, was described in 2001 by Time magazine as “America’s best singer”. Superlatives accompanied Wilson throughout her career; her vocal skills supported them.

Wilson’s ancestry was West African and European, and the Delta blues and gospel sounds she heard in her Mississippi childhood affected her deeply – but so did the guitar harmonies her father taught her, and the early instruction in classical piano she received from her music-teacher mother. Both her parents were Miles Davis and Motown admirers, too.

I first heard Wilson live at a small arts festival at London’s Half Moon theatre in 1989. Some of the music press was touting the then 33-year-old as a “jazz singer for the 90s”. But Wilson had been audible on the jazz cognoscenti’s radar for at least four years before that – on her assured contributions to the progressive postbop albums by the US saxophonist Steve Coleman, which spawned the edgy, genre-fluid, new-jazz movement dubbed M-Base. Also there was her own sharply contrasting collection of American songbook classics (including Polka Dots and Moonbeams, and Shall We Dance?) on the acclaimed 1988 release Blue Skies.

Wilson offered glimpses of much of what was to come in her work at that Half Moon gig – deftly interweaving horn-like swerves of pitch and fast bebop scat phrasing from the lineage of Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter with the spinechilling contralto soulfulness of Nina Simone, alongside abstract sounds more suggestive of free-jazz.

She won Grammy awards for the eclectic New Moon Daughter (1996) with its Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday and Monkees covers, and for the highly personal standards-based Loverly (2009). She had also played, to great acclaim, one of the two central roles as enslaved people in Wynton Marsalis’s Pulitzer-winning jazz oratorio, Blood on the Fields (1997).

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Cassandra was the youngest of the three children of Mary (nee McDaniel) and Herman Fowlkes Jr, who were both teachers. Herman was also a bass guitarist in local bands and taught his daughter basic guitar chords after she had had piano lessons from her mother; by the time she entered high school she played the guitar and clarinet, and was beginning to write her own songs.

Cassandra had also heard plenty of Delta blues music and the grittily dramatic autobiographical revelations of such African-American blues pioneers as Muddy Waters and Johnson had already enthralled her. But in secondary school, at Millsaps college, her cultural and social connections widened. She played Dorothy in a school production of The Wizard of Oz at 16, discovered Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and formed a folk trio with two white fellow-students – a liaison facilitated by Mississippi’s long-delayed desegregation of its schools in 1970, and which she would acknowledge as a musical turning point for her.

Wilson attended Jackson State University, graduating in 1980 with a degree in communication techniques and mass-media methods. It was an education that pointed her towards work in television and radio, but she was already performing in coffee-houses and clubs as a jazz/folk singer.

In 1981 she moved to New Orleans with Anthony Wilson, her first husband and a radio host. The marriage later ended in divorce. The crescent city’s musical opportunities were plentiful, and Wilson sang the vocal lead on an Allen Toussaint-produced Latin-jazz album called Tropical Breeze, with Jasmine, a local band. She also sat in with Ellis Marsalis, and Earl Turbinton Jr, a soul/R&B saxophonist, gave her music lessons.

In 1982, Wilson moved to New York, joined jam sessions, studied ear training with the trombonist Grachan Moncur III, and encountered Coleman’s adventurous expansions of bebop into funk, hip-hop, 12-tone modern-classical ideas, and the spontaneous harmony ensemble methods of his namesake Ornette Coleman.

Wilson contributed expressive vocals to Steve Coleman’s albums Motherland Pulse and On the Edge of Tomorrow (1985, 1986), experiences that stretched her talents for impromptu wordless vocals, and the note-bending elasticity, lustrous textures, and vaulting range of her remarkable voice.

She began releasing her own albums for the German producer Stefan Winter on his new JMT label, releases that evolved from M-Base’s structural radicalism to more song-based originals and covers drawing on a lyrical soulfulness deep within her Delta background. It was her third album for JMT, the standards-based Blue Skies (1988), that alerted mainstream fans and the music business to Wilson’s wider appeal.

In 1989, Wilson was invited to open for Davis, a personal idol, at the Chicago JVC Jazz festival, and by 1993 she was signed to the renowned Blue Note label. With the albums Blue Light ’Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter (her first Grammy-winner), Wilson revealed how powerfully she could re-imagine a famous song such as Strange Fruit, as well as classics by Mitchell, Johnson, Van Morrison – and the Monkees’ Last Train to Clarksville, chosen by Wilson for its Vietnam-bound US soldier’s message. She tended to undersell her fine original compositions such as Until and Memphis, and her sensitive delivery of them deserved more attention than they received in her most cover-devoted years.

Travelling Miles, Wilson’s 1999 tribute, featured some of her most expressive singing – especially on the evocative Time After Time – although her lyrics overlaid on what had been spontaneous Davis instrumentals occasionally detracted from the original pieces’ implacably hypnotic drive. Belly of the Sun (2002) was a personal homage to blues of all kinds (recorded in an abandoned Mississippi railway station) that included Wichita Lineman, and Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm; and Loverly (2008) was an affectionate return to standard songs after a long gap, enhanced by the presence of the pianist Jason Moran in the lineup.

Wilson released her final solo album, the respectful homage to Holiday, Coming Forth By Day, in 2015. The same year, she returned to live in Jackson, founding a jazz club and a record label with an old friend, the singer Rhonda Richmond, to promote the arts in Mississippi.

Boston’s Berklee College of Music awarded Wilson an honorary doctorate in music in 2020, and in 2022 the US government presented her with its highest jazz award, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master fellowship. Her final live performance came in June this year, at the Toronto jazz festival.

Her further marriages to Bruce Lincoln and Isaach de Bankolé ended in divorce. She is survived by her son Jeris, from her first marriage.