Cassandra Wilson started the current resurgence of jazz singing as a crossover success with Blue Light ’Til Dawn (Blue Note) in 1993. That’s when, working with producer Craig Street, she switched up from being a jazz singer in the Betty Carter/Sarah Vaughan mode, dropped the standard piano/bass/drums backing, and mixed up her approach with a variety of rootsy acoustic instrumentation and a broad selection of old roots and blues, new pop, and originals. And she had that glorious contralto voice — dark, rich, enveloping. Finally it had a place to live.
After wending her way through a variety of backgrounds, she’s changed up again with the new Thunderbird (Blue Note), working for the first time with producer T Bone Burnett and incorporating hip-hop beats and samples and fancy post-production. (Wilson will be at the Berklee Performance Center this Saturday.) It’s her best album in years, I think, and again, it’s the sound that makes it. Just about every track has a firm rhythmic spine, hooky verse-chorus turn-arounds, and a wealth of percolating sonic detail that nudges the material along without overwhelming it. The first tune, “Going to Mexico,” starts with a tinkling keyboard riff and continues with what sounds like male backing vocals tripping along with a rhythmic “bong” call-and-response with the piano. (No vocals besides Wilson’s are credited, but there’s a sample from the Wild Tchoupitoulas’s Mardi Gras anthem “Hey Pocky A-Way.”) Then a heavy drum beat and Wilson’s voice: “Yellow sun/In the distance/Turnin’ me a pretty golden brown/Smoke and rum/Is my mission/Happiness is all I need right now.” It’s all sung in Wilson’s upper register, centerstage, her voice coming in double-tracked on the word “happiness” and then second and third Wilsons joining her from stage left and right.
Throughout the album, Burnett plays with Wilson’s voice, moving it all around the soundstage. “Come on all, ya’ll, let’s go,” she says as if from the next room in “Go to Mexico” before the piece lifts off in the out-chorus of Spanish and happy babble. “Heh, heh, yeah,” she laughs in Willie Dixon’s “I Want To Be Loved.” Wilson sometimes has seemed in danger of becoming an imperious diva — impressive, but no fun. Here she’s loose, spontaneous, sexy. The production is as controlled as ever, but Burnett thought to save those laughs and shouts from various takes and use them. And on a straightforward piece like the traditional “Easy Rider,” the instrumentation clears a dramatic space for Wilson when it counts: “The man I love, you know he must be out of town.”
When I talk to Wilson on the phone about Thunderbird, she says this is the first time since her days with the old M-Base collective in Brooklyn that she’s done so much in-studio collaboration — many of the tracks are credited to all the players on them. “Go to Mexico” emerged from improvisations built around a loop created by programmer Mike Elizondo. At first, Wilson says, she sang nonsense syllables over the music, free-associating lyrics. “Usually the lyrics, or whatever words come out, are an indication of what the song is about. So it’s just about listening to the track over and over again, picking out pieces and trying to figure out, okay, what was I thinking or what was I feeling or what were we thinking and just trying to associate the moment with . . . uh, poetry.”
