Cassandra Wilson, Grammy-winning jazz singer, dies at 70

Cassandra Wilson, the two-time Grammy-winning jazz singer whose deep contralto ranged across blues, folk, country and pop, died Wednesday, Sept. 2, at the age of 70 at her home in Jackson, Mississippi.

Robert Torre, Wilson's longtime manager, announced her death in a statement, telling the New Jersey radio station WBGO that she died early Wednesday morning. Hinds County Coroner Jeramiah Howard confirmed her death.

Wilson won two Grammy Awards over a career of four decades and was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2022. In 2001, Time magazine called her 'America's Best Singer,' a label that captured how hard listeners and critics found it to file her under any single style, from blues and folk to country, R&B and pop.

A death in Jackson

The statement said Wilson died at home with family and close friends present, and asked that the family's privacy be respected as they grieved. It described her as a legendary jazz artist, the phrasing her manager used to open the announcement of her death.

Neither the statement nor the coroner gave a cause of death.

Cassandra Wilson transitioned peacefully at home, surrounded by family, close friends, and her manager. Her family and close friends respectfully ask for privacy during this difficult time as they grieve her loss.

Jackson Mayor John Horhn called Wilson an 'extraordinary native daughter' and said the city had lost a singular musical voice.

Raised on her father's records

She was born Cassandra Fowlkes in Jackson on Dec. 4, 1955, to Herman B. Fowlkes, a working musician who mainly played bass and guitar, and Dr. Mary Fowlkes, an educator. Both her parents worked in education, and her father kept a large jazz collection that she remembered filling the house when she was a little girl.

Wilson began piano lessons at 6 and took up the guitar at 12, drawn to the archtop Gibson her father played and the harmonics that rang from its strings. She played clarinet in marching bands, and some of her earliest performances found her backing herself on acoustic guitar, in the manner of two chief influences, Robert Johnson and Joni Mitchell.

And the harmonics sounded angelic to me. It sounded like heavenly music. And that's when I started to notice the guitar more and more. So after seven years of piano lessons, I asked my father if I could start playing the guitar.

She studied at Millsaps College and Jackson State University, where she earned a degree in mass communications, and took jazz lessons on the side from the drummer Alvin Fielder, a charter member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

In the early 1980s she moved to New Orleans, where she worked as an assistant public affairs director for a local television station and married a radio disc jockey named Anthony Wilson, who once announced weekends on WBGO. The couple soon relocated to New York, and she fell in with a progressive circle of improvisers gathering around the saxophonist Steve Coleman.

From M-Base to Blue Note

Wilson was a founding member of Coleman's M-Base Collective and became its principal vocalist, appearing on his 1985 debut, Motherland Pulse, and touring in the trio New Air. She opened for Miles Davis in those early years and recorded her own first album, Point of View, released in 1986 with collaborators including Coleman, the trombonist Grachan Moncur III and the guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly.

Her signing to Blue Note Records in the early 1990s reshaped her sound. On Blue Light 'Til Dawn she traded her earlier funk experiments for a spare acoustic setting, singing renditions of Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and Ann Peebles alongside her own writing. New Moon Daughter followed the same path, and while the records drew wide acclaim, some in the jazz world faulted them for stepping outside its conventions.

I continue to choose the path I take musically.

Wilson was nominated for four Grammys and won twice, both for best jazz vocal album, taking the award in 1997 for New Moon Daughter and in 2009 for Loverly, a program of standards. She also won the Django D'Or and the Edison Music Award, and Mississippi placed a Blues Trail marker in her honor.

She was a central voice in Wynton Marsalis's oratorio Blood on the Fields, singing the character Leona in a work that in 1997 became the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

The records she left behind

Across her career Wilson recorded with a wide range of artists, among them Coleman, Greg Osby, Terence Blanchard, Olu Dara, Charlie Haden, Elvis Costello, Meshell Ndegeocello, Luther Vandross and Angelique Kidjo. She guested on the Roots' songs 'Silent Treatment' and 'One Shine,' and her own 2010 album, Silver Pony, gathered John Legend, Jon Batiste and Ravi Coltrane.

Between the funk of Jumpworld in 1990 and her later standards, Wilson explored Miles Davis's catalog on Traveling Miles and gave fresh arrangements to jazz standards on Rendezvous. New Moon Daughter placed songs by the Monkees and Hank Williams beside her own, including a personal reading of 'Last Train to Clarksville,' and for Belly of the Sun in 2002 she recorded in a converted train station in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Her final solo album, Coming Forth by Day, arrived in 2015 as a tribute to Billie Holiday, released on what would have been Holiday's 100th birthday. That same year she performed a concert at the Apollo Theater marking the centennial, a full-circle gesture for a singer who had covered Holiday's 'I Wished on the Moon' on her very first album.

Her timbre drew comparisons to maplewood smoke and wildflower honey. Ben Ratliff of The New York Times once wrote that her records ran the history of New World popular music through a filter of prewar Southern roots music reimagined by New York jazz musicians.

Wilson's refusal to stay inside the borders of straight-ahead jazz defined her from the start. Billboard named the acoustic standards set Blue Skies its jazz album of the year in 1988, and she promptly turned away from that success, cutting the futuristic funk record Jumpworld and following her own restless instincts wherever they led, even when the jazz establishment balked.

She kept writing and recording across four decades, drawing on the jazz songbook, the Delta blues, Laurel Canyon folk-rock and mainstream pop without settling in any one of them. Her recordings and her influence outlast her.

Sounding like the South

Jon Batiste, who appeared on Silver Pony, said Wilson's music sounded like 'the South,' crediting her way of folding folk, R&B and diasporic traditions into experimental and popular forms as a major influence on his own work. She died in the same Mississippi city that raised her, seventy years after it first heard her. Wilson is survived by a son, Jeris, the subject of 'Out Loud (Jeris' Blues)' on her 1991 album She Who Weeps.