Born December 4, 1955 in Jackson, Mississippi, to a musical family (her father was guitarist and bassist Herman Fowlkes), Cassandra Wilson studied piano from the age of nine and began writing her own songs on guitar at age 12. By age 19, she started performing folk material around Mississippi and Arkansas and gradually became immersed in jazz while studying with Alvin Fielder and singing with the Black Arts Music Society in Jackson. By 1981, she relocated to New Orleans and began a career in broadcasting. “I had just gotten my degree in mass communications from Jackson State University and was working as the assistant public affairs director of a local television station in New Orleans,” she recalls. “At that point, I just assumed that television would be the thing that I would do as a career. But still, the music was the most important thing for me.” Wilson pursued her musical interests on the side and eventually met New Orleans saxophonist Earl Turbinton, who became an important mentor for her. “I was making a transition from a folk period, where Joni Mitchell was all I was really interested in, and going from that into jazz. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter. And my voice at that point was still very high. It didn’t have any of the coloration that I have now. It might have had traces of it, but it certainly wasn’t as deep and dark as it is now.” In 1982 she relocated to New York and began working with David Holland and Abbey Lincoln.

That naturally smoky, sultry voice has now graced nine albums as a leader and another dozen as a featured vocalist with Steve Coleman and Five Elements, the M- Base Collective, New Air and Bob Belden’s Manhattan Rhythm Club. Wilson has come full circle back to the folk, pop and blues music that initially stirred her soul. And she’s tackling this material in the spirit of a true jazz singer. “It’s been very cyclical, you know,” she says. “Of course, the first thing I listened to as a kid was jazz, so it made sense after the folk music to come back to jazz. And now it makes just as much sense for me to be singing tunes by Joni Mitchell, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and the Monkees.” On the album New Moon Daughter (1995) Wilson’s five originals show a leap in her development as a songwriter and lyricist that adds to her growing reputation as “the most accomplished jazz vocalist of her generation” (Time magazine). As on1993’s Blue Light ’till Dawn, she also examines her musical roots while putting her own stamp on an eclectic mix of pop, folk, country and blues tunes by Hank Williams, Neil Young, Hoagy Car-michael, U2, Billie Holiday, Son House and the Monkees. Blue Light ’til Dawn, Wilson’s highly acclaimed Blue Note debut, has sold in excess of 250,000 copies worldwide and led to her recognition as “Female Singer of the Year” in 1994 and 1995’s Down Beat Readers Poll.

In the January 1995 issue of Down Beat, editor John Ephland wrote “Not since Billie Holiday has a jazz singer crisscrossed the boundaries between jazz and pop with such reverence and authenticity.” But perhaps producer Craig Street put it best in evaluating Wilson’s talent. “It doesn’t matter what Cassandra does, it all comes out sounding like Cassandra, and it all comes out sounding like jazz. The nature of jazz to come is that it doesn’t have any rules… it’s about going out on a limb. And to her credit, especially being someone who was immersed in jazz, she was willing to push to some places on this record that other people probably wouldn’t push to.”

More at Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Note website.