Cassandra Wilson, the Mississippi contralto who remade the jazz song, dies at 70

Cassandra Wilson died at home in Jackson, Mississippi, on the morning of 2 September. She was 70. Hinds County coroner Jeramiah Howard confirmed the death and did not give a cause. Her manager, Robert Torre, told WBGO that she was with family, close friends and him, and asked for privacy.

Time magazine called her America's best singer in 2001. She won two Grammys: best jazz vocal performance for New Moon Daughter in 1997, and best jazz vocal album for Loverly in 2009. She was nominated four times. Those prizes describe a career that refused to stay inside the standards book.

Jackson, then Brooklyn, then Blue Note

She was born Cassandra Fowlkes on 4 December 1955 in Jackson. Her father, Herman B. Fowlkes, played jazz guitar. Her mother taught elementary school. Wilson started piano at six, guitar at 12, and professional singing in her late teens. She studied at Millsaps College and Jackson State University, then moved to New York in the early 1980s.

In Brooklyn she fell in with saxophonist Steve Coleman and the M-Base circle, which also included Geri Allen and Greg Osby. The group treated rhythm as something to rebuild, not inherit. Wilson's contralto, low and smoky, gave that project a human centre. She opened for Miles Davis. She toured with Wynton Marsalis. She still preferred to call herself a musician rather than a jazz singer.

The records that reached beyond the clubs arrived on Blue Note. Blue Light 'Til Dawn (1993) and New Moon Daughter (1995) put Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Neil Young next to originals without treating the covers as novelties. She sang the blues of the Mississippi she came from and the folk and pop songs she liked, in the same register. Jon Batiste said on Wednesday that she sounded like the South.

What she changed

A generation of singers learned from those albums that a jazz record could hold a guitar, a hand drum and a country lyric without becoming a crossover stunt. Silver Pony (2010) brought John Legend, Batiste and Ravi Coltrane into the same session. She worked with the Roots and with Angelique Kidjo. Berklee gave her an honorary doctorate in 2020. The National Endowment for the Arts named her a Jazz Master.

She was married for a time to the actor Isaac de Bankolé. She kept a home in Jackson even when the work lived in New York and on the road. The Mississippi Blues Trail put up a marker in her name. That marker and the two Grammy statues now bookend a catalogue that is still the easiest way to hear how a voice from Jackson rewrote the American song list without leaving jazz behind.

The cause of death is not public. The work is. Put on New Moon Daughter and the argument about category ends in the first chorus.