Piece Description

Cassandra Wilson is known as one of today's most compelling jazz vocalists. Her album "Loverly" won the 2009 Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album. But her musical imagination pushes beyond what most people think of as jazz. For a start, her band is hardly a standard jazz combo. There's no piano to support her voice with chords. Instead, she prefers to sing against the sound of a harmonica -- or maybe a banjo. To lay the down the groove, she has a percussionist and a drummer, fighting it out. In this feature, Wilson talks about her love of percussion, and describes how the music of Miles Davis helped her to quiet her own approach to singing. As in all the pieces in David Schulman's CPB-supported Musicians in their own words series, the story is told through a mix of the performer's voice and music. Two mixes are provided for programming flexibility, including a short mix that will fit the new ATC cutaway. Scripts for intro and outro are attached. This piece works well pegged to local performances. This piece first aired, in slightly different form, on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.