Cassandra Wilson’s big breakthrough

This album introduced a new sound in vocal jazz in the 1990s. Now it is reissued on vinyl.

Cassandra Wilson – Blue Light ‘til Dawn (Blue Note, 2022)

When this album was new in 1993, I gave it to the woman I was living with hoping it would get her more interested in jazz, since I was growing tired of her rock albums. It worked surprisingly well. So much so that I still know this album by heart. She played it that much.

It also says something about the success singer Cassandra Wilson had with this music which addressed audiences not primarily interested in jazz. Sure, You Don’t Know What Love Is is a jazz standard, but there are other songs by blues and rock musicians like Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, and several by Wilson herself in the same vein.

The production and arrangement of the music is cool and sparse with guitars, steel guitar, violin, bass and percussion. The only horn players are cornetist Olu Dara and clarinetist Don Byron on one song each. Otherwise, the focus is on Cassandra Wilson’s dark rich voice.

A new style

Wilson was hardly a newcomer in jazz having released eight albums before Blue Light ‘til Dawn, but it was with this album that she got a lot of publicity and recognition. It was the first one in long series of albums that she recorded for Blue Note.

Now it gets reissued on vinyl. Originally it was released on CD. The album still holds up very well and it deserves to be heard by new generations of listeners. 

When the album was released other major jazz singers from older generations like Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln was still active. Today Wilson herself holds that seniority to many young talents, and at least to me she is the jazz singer most associated with the 1990s, not at least through albums like this one, even if she has a less spectacular technique then someone like Betty Carter. Instead, Cassandra Wilson created a concept of blending different musical styles which she was artistically strong enough to meld into her own.