Jazz
Cassandra Wilson died on 2 September at her home in Jackson, Mississippi, aged seventy. No cause has been given.
Wilson sang in the contralto register and got her start in the eighties within the M-Base collective, alongside Steve Coleman, in an era of funk and near-experimental free jazz.
«Blue Light ‘til Dawn» (1993) was the record that put her on the map: on it she sang Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell and Ann Peebles alongside the jazz repertoire. From that record onward, she treated country, folk and rural blues as improvisational material on equal footing with the Great American Songbook standards.
She won a Grammy for «New Moon Daughter» and recorded much of her core body of work for Blue Note. «Coming Forth by Day» (2015), a tribute to Billie Holiday, was the last record she released: she hadn’t put out another since.
Text by Aina Torrents