under hues, deepest blues hereafter
we touch souls and the moment glows1
I don’t remember if it was her Blue Skies album of jazz standards, playing “Sweet Lorraine” in a voice I had never heard, that drew me in, or if my first moment of exposure was Tower Records. I believe it was the former, playing on WCLK as I drove between my internship and my parents’ home sometime in 1994. I knew I loved her sound, but remember, the public Internet had barely begun, so I had only a faint idea of what she looked like or what else she had done.
I walked into Tower Records near Lenox Mall, in Buckhead. I was back from college for some reason, probably a sophomore, probably 1994. In this era, digital distribution of music did not yet exist, so a record store that allowed you to hear anything before buying it was incredible. I walked the aisles, thumbing through jazz. And I saw a picture of a beautiful woman, a little older than me, her lips parted as if she were about to say something, or sing something, or utter a sound filtered through a dream. I saw the attention it had received from jazz critics, and was intrigued by that signature contralto that was as captivating as the photo. I took it home.
I listened to that album over the next year in the way we did then, repeatedly, every nook and cranny. We only had what albums we could carry, and it was often easier to repeat than switch. I was a romantic, unseasoned fool, processing feelings about women and the world that I didn’t yet know how to contain, channel, or express. The song I remember most from the album wasn’t the blues covers that I wasn’t quite ready to hear; you have to have lived to know the blues. It wasn’t ancestral rondo-like “Sankofa”. It was first, a jazz ballad by Ray Charles called “Tell Me You’ll Wait For Me” that captured my young, fanciful heart. “Children of the Night” did tug at me as well, differently, a spiritual track that was haunted in the best way. It sounds like what you hope will happen when you follow the call of your name into the woods. And so I went, into her world.
so I go into the darkness of the night
i’ll walk the streets until i find
someone who is just like me
searching for some company2
There was a season where I picked up every album of hers I could find. I went back to her fusion masterpiece with Greg Osby and the M-BASE collective, Jump World, where I got to scratch my itch for dissonance and syncopation, combined with her lyrics which felt like spells. I loved playing it when traveling; it both felt like comfort and protection, and a secret. I was in my own world with her and the musicians, and in that space I could be free with my thoughts which I knew were not like other people’s.
i’m on my way to another world
where the people play
like clouds in the sky3
I listened to all the albums from the JMT years, even if I couldn’t fully lock in to the way her voice melted into the unexpected turns and twists like another instrument. I knew the energy was important, was what I wanted to shape me. I wrote poetry listening to the rhythmic stumble of “There She Goes” about a woman in love with a man who doesn’t want her. I understood that woman, even if my own life were not quite so dramatic.
woman why
does your world revolve around one man’s love
why can’t you see
see that he’s using you up?4
The albums matured faster than I did, which makes sense. Despite her youthful appearance she maintained through her life, she was just shy of twenty years older than me. New Moon Daughter brought more of the Mississippi Delta sounds that I’m only now beginning to truly understand, having lived enough to feel the blues. She dipped her twisting light brown locks in gold, and took on the American songbook, breathing red clay and root work and Scripture and blues into it, painting it Black.
She ventured to Brazil and back, holding “Waters of March” like an oracle singing the rhythm of life. She turned James Taylor’s rich rendition of “Only A Dream In Rio” into a diasporic reunification, as a banjo strums over Taylor’s insightful lyrics about the gringo gaze and what is underneath that perception, weighted by that essential contralto.
quando a nossa mãe acordar
andaremos ao sol
quando a nossa mãe acordar
cantará pelo sertão5
I saw her twice in concert: first in Atlanta during the Belly of the Sun tour, and then once in Vegas in a much more intimate setting. One magical weekend, I did a quick jaunt to Vegas and discovered she was playing at the Blue Note the next day. I didn’t want to book a hotel for another night, so I pushed my flight out until late that night. I wandered Vegas and slept in a movie theater. I went to the show exhausted but enamored, and watched the first set with transcendent joy. I even bonded with the drummer so much that I went to the airport, changed my flight, and came back for the second set. In my excitement I had drunk a lot, so I’m ashamed to say I fell asleep during the second set. I’m sure she saw me. I hoped she understood that I was literally living a dream. I’m pretty sure I flew home under my own power.
I considered getting a tattoo of her face on me somewhere, but even as much as she had shaped and guided me, I haven’t yet found what I want written forever on my body.
Her music continued to grow, and we parted ways, around 2003 with her Glamoured album. The quality didn’t change, but my ear did. I hungered for beats and international rhythms as I dove fully into the millennial lounge, house, and broken beat era. I was maturing in my own way, and I wasn’t ready to return to the loamy smells of her songs, with one foot in Old Mississippi and one foot in an Afrofuturist fantasy.
why don’t you stop and ask her how she feels
about the life she’s living?6
She kept making music. Thunderbird. Loverly. Another Country. I checked in, but listened less and less.
you broke into my world
shattering all of the lies that i’d heard
all my life
you are the whirlwind bending the trees
i am the summer breeze7
I was in my thirties. I had found myself in a rain forest in the West. I had experienced unexpected ways and kinds of love that changed my perception of the possible. I was more confident and had my own song and sound now. I had discovered my lifetime love in a friend I had met years prior. I thought I didn’t need Cassandra Wilson anymore.
didn’t think you could love me this way,
didn’t think you knew how
but now, dreams become reality
iconic memories8
I got married. Sometimes, times were hard, as in any marriage. We had human moments where we missed each other’s attempts to connect, where we couldn’t hear each other. Even though I didn’t listen to her anymore, Cassandra’s voice was in my bones, and she sang until I turned around and faced my love.
whatever it takes to make it right
no matter how hard, i will fight for you
i swear that it’s true
i want the sweetness in life with you9
It’s not a suitable wedding song, but it’s a damn fine marriage song.
I never put up that poster from when I saw her at her Belly of the Sun tour back in ’03 in my new office. She became “the music that shaped my 20s and early 30s” and was no longer “my favorite singer”, a spot that I have since left empty. Social media came into being, and for a while, I became a professional-grade DJ and focused on my craft. I don’t know if I ever got to play any Cassandra Wilson, even in my edgier sets. I thought I still loved her, but love is as love does.
love is blindness
i don’t want to see
won’t you wrap the night around me10
She appeared on social media. The tenor of her posts began to change. Her complicated love of this land common to Black Americans began to rankle and turn. She seemed to find QAnon and MAGA rhetoric more and more compelling and reposted and shared troubling messages.
I turned my back. I didn’t want to see someone who I had loved so much, who had shaped me, turn into one of them. I became a person who didn’t listen to Cassandra Wilson anymore.
i didn’t know i loved him till they lay him down11
Today, one of my oldest friends texted me to tell me she had died. I felt about it the way one feels when a person you’ve fallen out with dies. You think less about the sadness of it and more “that’s a shame, I guess.” Another close friend texted me. So did my mother-in-law. I decided tonight, while my lifetime love that I have found the sweetness in life with was working, I would play some Cassandra Wilson.
oh, how can I forget your starry eyes?
your hair when it’s lit by the moonlit skies?12
The music welcomed me back like a person who you used to have a conflict with, but who was just ready for it to be over. She knew it was too important and that life was too short to live our lives arms folded, backs turned. There are things that we must separate from for our safety, but not for this.
I played songs I had never heard from her newer albums. I played the old albums that I either had or could find online. And when I put on one of her oldest songs, from the 1986 album Point of View, I felt it. I felt the loss, of her artistry in the world, of my youth. I saw my life the way I see it sometimes, as a span through the years ranging from the four year old with the Afro and a desire to be helpful, through the lanky teenage years and the lonely early manhood where music spoke for me more than I spoke for myself, into my season of confidence and my emerging season of humility and gratitude, and beyond, to that day when I pass through the second Gate.
“I Am Waiting” somehow in just 3 minutes and 40 seconds, as young and simplistic as it was in some ways, managed to sum up every hope I ever had. Finding love. Being a better person. Being in community. Building a better world. Being seen as we truly are and loving ourselves anyway.
there is a dream that binds us
hidden in our hearts, there’s a thing to remind us
in spite of our demons, we will climb
oh love of my loves, i am waiting
open up your eyes
look, we’re so much closer now13
1 “Never Broken”, Cassandra Wilson
2 “Children of the Night”, Cassandra Wilson
3 “Woman on the Edge”, Cassandra Wilson
4 “There She Goes”, Cassandra Wilson
5 “Rio/Only A Dream”, Cassandra Wilson
6 “Woman on the Edge”, Cassandra Wilson
7 “Whirlwind Soldier”, Cassandra Wilson
8 “Iconic Memories”, Cassandra Wilson
9 “Until”, Cassandra Wilson
10 “Love Is Blindness”, Cassandra Wilson
11 “Death Letter”, Cassandra Wilson
12 “Tell Me You’ll Wait For Me”, Cassandra Wilson
13 “I Am Waiting”, Cassandra Wilson
Reforged 