[JPL] A Blues Diva in Weimar, Visiting on Her Own Terms

[r durfee]

November 19, 2007
Music Review | Cassandra Wilson
A Blues Diva in Weimar, Visiting on Her Own Terms 
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Cassandra Wilson ventured out of her normal comfort
zone on Saturday evening to give a recital of popular
standards at Café Sabarsky as the final event in the
Neue Galerie’s cabaret sidebar to Berlin in Lights, a
festival presented by Carnegie Hall. Talk about
crossover! Ms. Wilson is a singer who plays by her own
rules. With her dark, loamy jazz and blues voice, she
likes to make it up as she goes along, even in a
recital format. 

That doesn’t mean applying frills, scatting (in any
conventional sense), or dipping into gospel. Her
style, if it can be defined at all, might be described
as an internationally savvy deep blues. Each
interpretation is a sequence of vocal mood swings in
which she is cognizant of the words being sung but not
slavishly attached to them. To put it more simply, it
is a personal declaration of independence.

Accompanying Ms. Wilson on Saturday was Jason Moran, a
jazz pianist with classical roots and a strong touch
whose typical approach to a popular standard is to
begin a song as a semiclassical musical statement and
then to veer off on jazz, blues and minimalist
tangents. His communication on Saturday with Ms.
Wilson was intimate and playful. 

The major Berlin connection was Kurt Weill, the
composer of “My Ship,” “Speak Low,” “September Song”
and “Mack the Knife,” but there was a nod to the
Berlin-born composer Frederick Loewe in a witty
interpretation of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” (from “My
Fair Lady”), for which Ms. Wilson put on the hint of a
Cockney accent and, rolling her eyes, savored the
words “lots of chocolate for me to eat.” 

Another was the name Irving Berlin, whose song “Blue
Skies” began the program and which she treated as a
dialogue between positive and negative attitudes
expressed in singing that circled around the notes as
though she were deciding whether or not to land. 

The recital’s happiest moment was Ms. Wilson’s radiant
opening statement of “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,”
Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s fantasy of
lifetime domestic bliss. Its harshest performance was
a sarcastic, guttural “Mack the Knife,” in which Ms.
Wilson channeled the growl of Marianne Faithfull. The
only Brecht-Weill collaboration in the show, it
suggested that deeper exploration of their catalog by
Ms. Wilson might be in order. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/arts/music/19cass.html?ref=music

Roy Durfee
P.O. Box 40219
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87196-0219
rdurfee2003 at yahoo.com


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