I Heard Cassandra Wilson Sing Last Night

it was at Yoshi's in Oakland. The place was packed. Laine and I ended up in a corner right near (fortunately) the percussionist. Fortunately because the man was amazing. Yoshi's is not a big venue, so it's hard to say there's a bad seat in the house. You can't necessarily see everything, like I couldn't see the guitar player most of the night, but you can hear everything. Cassandra Wilson stood right up in front of the band and we could see her just fine.

I ran into someone I know at the end of the first set and she didn't know anything about Wilson, had come because it was a going away party for a colleague of her wife. She was "pleasantly surprised" at the performance. Pleasantly surprised by one of the world's greatest jazz singers, well.

I wrote jazz singer there, but Wilson is really a jazz musician, though with jazz singers that's usually the case. Thinking about the great jazz singers of the 20th century - Holiday, Fitzgerald, Vaughn, Horn, O'Day, Staton, and Washington - they were all musicians, rather than just a woman standing up singing in front of the band.

I don't want to distract myself with an argument whether Ronnie Spector, for example, is a musician, (she is), but to think about what it is that makes Wilson so extraordinary. It's her voice, which is deep and like burnt umber, like bittersweet chocolate, rich-toned, with an edge. But it's also what she chooses to sing and what she's brought into the jazz songbook. I wrote a couple of years ago about her version of "Last Train to Clarkesville" and she so owns Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" that I had no idea it was ever his song. She covers Dylan and Mitchell. Last night she sang a song written by Harold Arlen and Truman Capote called " A Sleeping Bee" which I'd never heard of before.

Still, some of the most amazing work she does is with traditional blues. Your basic blues is pretty simple music, 12 bars three or four chord changes, simple rhythms. Wilson takes it and spins it into jazz and reaches into the emotion of the music.

Everyone knows the blues is sad stuff. But how often does a performer makes you feel the sadness of the words in a song like Son House's "Death Letter", really feel it*? The White Stripes covered "Death Letter", all gymnastics, amazing slide guitar work. He could be singing about a car for all the attention he gives these lyrics:

Got up this morning,
At the break of day
Hugging the pillow
Where my sweet man used to lay

White uses the song as a pretext for his (considerable) chops. Wilson shows the desolation of loneliness and loss. Her chops make that possible, which is the better art.

She ended with "St. James Infirmary" last night taking it from some dim city's morgue to the side of a sunlit river in Africa (or Mississippi). I don't know how she did it. We could have stayed for a second set. but I didn't need to.

*Thanks to Laine for making me notice .