Remembering Cassandra Wilson, like so many of our artists who have passed on, means sitting with all of who they were. When I learned Cassandra had passed away this week, I felt conflicted. I was a longtime fan who loved her music, but in recent years I made a conscious decision to step away when Cassandra’s personal politics moved toward the MAGA movement.
The first time I heard Cassandra Wilson’s voice, I was completely spellbound. I was in college and deeply entrenched in learning all I could about Black women jazz vocalists. One of my professors, Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, who was writing about Billie Holiday at the time, urged me to listen to Cassandra.
Up until Farah’s recommendation, my ears were still learning the heavyweights of the canon like Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln, and Ella Fitzgerald. Farah suggested Cassandra as a crucial expansion of my learning and that lineage, and the moment I heard her voice, I understood why.
There was something about the fullness in Cassandra’s voice and the way she, like Billie Holiday before her, could wrap her voice around music while capturing the full range of Black life.
When she remade Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Cassandra’s version let the grief of lynchings stretch out through her voice as if she were traveling through a sonic time machine and reaching back into that era itself, her timbre carrying the trauma and terror, as well as the unrequited reckoning and embodied remembrance those horrors had passed along through generations.
The more I listened, the more hooked I got. Cassandra quickly emerged as my favorite contemporary jazz vocalist. I took the train into downtown Philly to a record store to buy Wilson’s CDs. I read any and every interview about Cassandra I could get my hands on. This was the mid-90s, and the jazz heads knew Cassandra and lauded her early work, but the mainstream world hadn’t fully discovered her yet.
Source: Why Cassandra Wilson’s Music Deserves To Be The Legacy We Honor [Op-Ed]
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