Cassandra Wilson – Belly Of The Sun

With Belly Of The Sun, jazz singer Cassandra Wilson completes an American trilogy begun with her Blue Note debut Blue Light Till Dawn and its follow-up New Moon Daughter. In simplest terms, these albums are jazz fusion, but of elements rarely heard or combined in modern jazz.

Slide resonator guitar, mandocello, violin, pedal steel, Hammond organ, even banjo and bazouki, all combine to give Wilson’s newfound sound (a radical departure from the straight-up jazz and funk of her early career) a profoundly rural caste, as country now as it was bluesy before. She cuts songs by Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Ann Peebles, and Van Morrison, and claims her own identity in them.

“Listen to the stories,” Charlie Parker once said of country music. And Wilson has. The highlights here include a richly percussive, intensely phrased reading of Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight”; a harrowing, funereal version of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move”; a languid, samba-meets-banjo rendition of James Taylor’s “Only A Dream In Rio”; a surprisingly sweet and tender take on Dylan’s “Shelter From The Storm”; and a ravishing, dreamlike interpretation of “Wichita Lineman”, sung from the point of view of the woman left behind.

An Afro-Carribean percussive groove is gently bedded beneath Wilson’s voluptuous phrasing, allowing the acoustic guitars and bass to stretch and glow around her. Recorded in an old Clarksdale train station, Belly Of The Sun is both a return to Wilson’s Mississippi homeland and a ravishing, deeply original vision of roots music.