This affect was especially powerful given her commitment to vulnerability. On “Glamoured” (2003), she frankly chronicled unrequited desire, especially on the half of the album that was original compositions (“Sleight of Time” and “I Want More” among them).
Ultimately, so much of Wilson’s unhurried expression connects back to Jackson, where she was born and spent her final years. When Wilson sings, whether it is on her tribute albums to Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, or on her own originals, what we hear is a lot like the experience of moving through the Mississippi Delta itself, through haunted cypress and elms. It takes its time, full of slow life, awake but almost dreamlike.
Her covers of blues songs by classic figures like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson often allowed some of the widest space for her expression, despite paying homage to well-trodden forms. “It’s a funny thing, people always ask me about the impact of blues on my life, and it’s difficult to describe to people — because when you’re born in Mississippi, the minute you come out of the womb, there’s blues,” she said in a 1995 TV interview. “It’s something that’s in the air; you walk out of the house and blues just comes up and slaps you in the face.”
Even as she pranced past the borders of familiar idioms, the warmth of Wilson’s voice and her purposeful pacing made experiments feel like inevitable destinations. Particularly in partnership with Street, she took M-BASE’s hybridizing approach and fused it with the popular repertoire to set a new standard for contemporary jazz. Street’s production work with artists including Lizz Wright and Meshell Ndegeocello further spread that impact to a generation of heirs.
“Jazz practitioners are not natural entertainers,” she wrote in a 2016 essay. “We are musicians who carry the legends and lore of an art form that is constantly evolving while also retaining a steadfast connection to its genesis. I follow this path to pay respect to my elders, homage to the ancestors, and to present uniquely inspired performances for my audiences.”
Rejecting the idea that her success had affected her relationship to the art form, she wrote: “My means are modest because my calling is paramount. I will always seek the truth and never lose my courage to express what matters. I own what I create in the marketplace. The marketplace does not own me.”
Wilson, so in possession of herself and her craft, could lead a listener wherever it struck her to go. There is an old TV broadcast, available on YouTube, of Wilson and her band playing “Redbone,” one of her most convicted and infectious originals, in 1995. She invokes orishas alongside biblical figures as she ad libs, giving herself something to use in conversation with the band, finally singing: “Little redbone girl’s going to go to heaven / Because she believes in her gods.”
