Jazz Divas - Dianne Reeves and Cassandra Wilson
—Genuine jazz divas are in short supply, but two who qualify for that title with ease, Dianne Reeves and Cassandra Wilson, have new CDs out. Both are in their early 50s, fully established in the jazz vocal pantheon and at the ripe pinnacle of their artistic careers. But they are also very different jazz singers, with diametric approaches to the jazz vocal art. Reeves is very much the glamorous diva who naturally seeks out the spotlight with her personality, image and a preternaturally gifted and accomplished voice to match. Wilson is the reluctant diva, cloaking her voice in the collaborative music surrounding her, eschewing vocal pyrotechnics for the intimacy of husky low tones and shadowy intimations. In a jazz vocal aviary, Reeves would be a colorful bird of paradise, Wilson a dark, shimmering raven.
Both singers offer new albums of mostly standards, with Reeves including R&B and pop in the mix, Wilson adding traditional blues, and both featuring guitars prominently. But while there’s a jazz-pop gloss, from producer George Duke, on some of Reeves’s tracks, Wilson’s homespun production - most of the recording was done in a house in Mississippi - leans toward a folk-jazz vibe, with African rhythmic undercurrents.
After her last album, the period-perfect Fifties retro-jazz cabaret Good Night and Good Luck, When You Know, Dianne Reeves (Blue Note) finds the singer returning to a more contemporary, at times commercial, mode. The album opens with the old Temptations signature song, “Just My Imagination,” Reeves gliding and swooping through the lyrics over a vaguely tropical background of guitars, electric piano and percussion. Reeves the thespian takes over on “Over the Weekend,” rivaling Nancy Wilson’s dramatic take on the song with stage-ready emoting heightened by a throbbing strings section. Those strings return later to add to the centrifugal momentum of “The Windmills of Your Mind.” And there’s a children’s chorus on the newish power-pop title song.
But for fans of Reeves, the jazz singer heard to such advantage on Good Night and Good Luck, the best tracks here are the sparer, less glossy ones featuring the guitars of Romero Lubambo (acoustic) and Russell Malone, who had toured Europe with Reeves in 2007 in a format dubbed “Strings Attached.” Minnie Ripperton’s mid-’70s hit, “Lovin’ You,” is given a more intimate reading with guitars and percussion, while the Peggy Lee-Cy Coleman ballad, “I’m In Love Again,” with just guitars, has an exquisite delicacy, Reeves sinuously caressing the lyric - note how she lingers on and extends the syllables of “enjoy,” the kind of perfect detail that nudges a performance from very good to indelible. Such arresting moments occur repeatedly throughout When You Know. And then there is the complete, turnaround surprise of the final track, a song she credits to things her mother used to say/sing to her. “Today Will Be A Good Day” finds Malone getting down and dirty with a guitar twang, tambourine and washboard adding to the country blues vibe, as Reeves lets her hair down and gets gritty in a rollicking finale.
Loverly, Cassandra Wilson (Blue Note), credits the singer as producer, but she calls this album recorded in a house she set up as a recording studio in her native Mississippi a collaborative effort, crediting especially the input of Yoruban drummer/perussionist Lekan Babalola. Also joining Wilson are her longtime guitarist Marvin Sewell and bassist Lonnie Plaxico, plus drummer Herlin Riley and new collaborator pianist Jason Moran, whose solos are instrumental highlights. Nicholas Payton adds his trumpet to the opening track, a fast percolating “Lover Come Back to Me” with Wilson purring along easily in the cut behind the tempo. Bassist Reginald Veal duets with the singer on her deeply contemplative take on “The Very Thought of You.”
With her mossy low range, insinuatingly sultry voice and penchant for lagging behind or stretching out the time, Wilson can take the most familiar standard and inhabit it as if annexing it into her own musical world. She does just that with “Gone With the Wind” and “Til There Was You,” both suspended on African rhythms with Wilson’s voice floating and wafting through like a low flute or woodwind. She mixes it up more with the rhythms on “Caravan” and the African “Arere,” and conspires with the hip-hop influenced ruckus of beats on a deconstruction of “St. James Infirmary.” That and “Dust My Broom” are two old blues tunes she completely makes her eccentric own.
Two other tracks testify to Wilson’s ability to illuminate standards in a classical jazz manner. With just Sewell’s steel string slide guitar, she finds the coy and wistful sides of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” rescuing that overdone standard from the maudlin pit it falls into too often. Howard Arlen and Truman Capote’s “A Sleepin’ Bee” is revived as a loose, infectious swinger (no African beats here) with Wilson savoring the jeu d’esprit of the lyrics and, in her scatting, the beguiling harmonies.
Loverly, Cassandra Wilson CD
George Kanzler was Critic at Large, covering performing arts and jazz, for The Beat, the Upstate's now defunct alternate weekly. He contributes to magazines, including Jazz Times and Hot House, and has been a syndicated music and arts critic when he worked for a major metropolitan newspaper. His idea of heaven is where Duke Ellington's music is played and Shakespeare's plays are performed -- all the time.
