Cassandra Wilson, the Jackson contralto who stretched jazz sideways, dies at 70

Cassandra Wilson died at home in Jackson, Mississippi, on 1 September. She was 70. Hinds County coroner Jeramiah Howard confirmed the death and did not give a cause. Robert Torre, her longtime manager, told WBGO that she "transitioned peacefully at home, surrounded by family, close friends, and her manager." The family asked for privacy. The New York Times carried the obituary into its print edition of 4 September. The International New York Times was still listing her on its 8 September arts page, which is how a death from last week is still moving through the world's breakfast tables.

Wilson was born Cassandra Fowlkes in Jackson on 4 December 1955 and graduated from Murrah High School. She studied at Jackson State and Millsaps, then left for New York in the 1980s and fell in with Steve Coleman and the M-Base circle. She opened for Miles Davis. She toured with Wynton Marsalis. Time magazine called her America's best singer in 2001. She preferred to be called a musician.

The records that fixed her name were not straight-ahead songbook sets. New Moon Daughter won the Grammy for best jazz vocal performance in 1997. Loverly won best jazz vocal album in 2009. In rooms she would move from Joni Mitchell to Muddy Waters to Hank Williams to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Bob Marley without treating any of those names as a stunt. The instrument was a low contralto that Jon Batiste, in a message after her death, said sounded like the South. Dee Dee Bridgewater wrote that she would miss the rare phone calls.

Jackson kept claiming her. She came back. Mayor John Horhn called her an extraordinary native daughter. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker already carries her name. She held an honorary doctorate from Berklee and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award. She had been married to the actor Isaach de Bankolé. She could have lived in New York or Paris and chosen not to.

Jazz singing in her generation often meant either a polished standards career or a fusion experiment that aged badly. Wilson did something slower. She treated country, folk and Delta blues as material a jazz musician was allowed to pick up without apology, then arranged those songs with spare drums, acoustic guitar and a voice that sat behind the beat. Younger singers who now move across genres without announcing the crossing are working on a path she cut in the mid-1990s, when that move still required a defence.

There will be tribute concerts. There is already an argument about which album a new listener should start with. Blue Light 'Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter are the usual answers. The more useful fact is simpler. A musician from Jackson spent four decades proving that a jazz singer could carry Mississippi into a New York club and leave both rooms intact. That work is now a closed catalogue.