Perhaps Cassandra Wilson started out as a jazz singer. After all, she seemed entirely content to offer her take on tried-and-true standards like “Body and Soul” and “My One and Only Love” from the get-go. Her rich, relaxed delivery drew comparisons to other stalwarts, Betty Carter and Nina Simone among them, but, barring the growing dreadlocks, Wilson seemed all too ordinary around the edges. It wasn’t until the early 90’s she started to really pull out the big guns, proving she was not just another pretty face with the vocals to match, but one who started reaching beyond the Ella realm for her material. Songs from heavyweights Joni Mitchell, Robert Johnson, U2, Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young were steadily added to her repertoire and eyebrows started rising. Sure, she started penning her own lyrics as well, but it was her second look at songs a mainstream radio-listening audience was already quite familiar with – creating a new sense of starkness within the lot – that was the exciting part.
It isn’t entirely fair to pair that sense of thinking with her latest album, Belly of the Sun, however. While she handpicks songs from the likes of Dylan and Robbie Robertson this time around, it’s altogether too easy to “ooh” and “aah” over the old standbys (albeit with admittedly fresh takes); most grew to be favorites in their respective genres given time. Who’s to say that her own “Just Another Parade”, a duet with now-hot commodity India.Arie, won’t become preferred in, say, the neo-soul movement? It could happen.
Sometimes criticized for her weak writing, “Justice” finds her digging deep, way down past the “bottle of justice”, the “slice of opportunity” and finding satisfaction in the “box of reparation … the big one that matches [her] scars”. It’s the strongest political statement she makes on the record, one that could as easily sway towards a history of slavery as it might abuse, or both, considering how they’re so closely connected. Critics should pony up to this one and try it on for size, as there’s little weak about it. If anything, Wilson should be praised for fitting the delicate subject matter around such an exciting arrangement, surely just one more reason some view her as more folk than jazz. Her other lyrical attempts, “Drunk As Cooter Brown” and “Show Me A Love”, while lacking that same sense of strength, nevertheless mesh well with the covers, colored with glorious percussion and funk guitar.
And then we’ve the covers. “Darkness on the Delta”, a duet with 80-year-old “Boogalo” Ames on piano, finds her at her most like jazz-like turn. It’s a lightly swinging number possessing all the secret powers of sticking inside one’s head for days. The transition from Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of Match” flows so smoothly into Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move” (which some might know solely from the Rolling Stones’ take on it), the latter comes off as some sort of afterthought. Stripped down to the bare essentials, Richard Johnston on guitar, Jeffrey Haynes on a plastic tub (!) and Rhonda Richmond, Kevin Breit and Cyro Baptista lending backup vocals, this is Wilson’s gospel-tinged blues turn. Maybe it’s the knowledge that this was recorded in an abandoned boxcar (the rest of Sun being recorded in the Clarksdale Train Depot in Mississippi) that places her version higher than the Stones’ in my book. Then again, it could simply be the hand clapping and finger snapping that serve as splendid, welcomed accents to Wilson’s vocals. To hear it is to experience what McDowell had in mind for “Move” when he wrote the tune.
“Shelter from the Storm” and “Wichita Lineman” (a hit for Glen Campbell once upon a time) come out freshly scrubbed and newly dressed as affecting love songs. And she revisits Robert Johnson territory once again (she did both “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Hellhound on my Trail” on 1993’s Blue Light ‘Til Dawn) on the closing track, “Hot Tamales”. It’s an all-too-brief rendition, but a perfectly joyful way to wrap things up.
What is interesting, especially here, is how Wilson does a fine job of making this a cohesive affair. Though she hops from bossa nova to jazz to blues to country, she does so with such a linear sense of musicianship that it doesn’t strike of her saying, “Now, look what else I can do!” Rather, she comes off as one entirely comfortable in her own skin, singing whatever she’s compelled to, musical boundaries be damned. The entire conglomeration of performers and its enthusiasts – in the world of jazz and beyond –would do well to see through those kind of eyes.
