First launched on October 7, 2003, Glamoured was singer Cassandra Wilson’s sixth album for Blue Be aware Information. Born in Jacksonville, Mississippi, Wilson was 38 years outdated when she joined Blue Be aware, in 1993, after the corporate’s then-president, Bruce Lundvall, introduced her to the label. By this level she was already a rising star of the jazz world, having impressed with seven very assorted albums for German indie label JMT, launched between 1986 and 1992, which confirmed that she wasn’t beholden to the usual repertoire and introduced one thing recent and cutting-edge to the style.
Wilson launched the Blue Be aware part of her profession with the acclaimed Blue Mild ’Til Daybreak. It was a panoramic album that demonstrated how Wilson might use her sultry voice, with its smoky, caressing tones, to take songs from quite a lot of vastly completely different writers (from Joni Mitchell and Robert Johnson to Van Morrison and Hoagy Carmichael) and remodel them into profound expressions of affection and life that appeared to emanate from her personal soul. Her means to make any track appear deeply private and like one thing she had written herself grew to become Wilson’s hallmark, and she or he continued to impress together with her recordings for Blue Be aware all through the remainder of the 90s.
Eclectic covers in various kinds
2002’s Stomach Of The Solar was Wilson’s first album of the brand new millennium and the second consecutive album that she produced herself. She recorded a part of it in her native Mississippi, the place she would return to file Glamoured a yr later. The classes came about at Sonic Temple studio between December 2002 and March 2003, and the contributing musicians included famous French harmonica participant Gregoire Maret, plus guitarists Brandon Ross and Fabrizio Sotti. From the world of up to date jazz, Wilson enlisted the assistance of bassist Reginald Veal and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington.
As together with her earlier Blue Be aware albums, Glamoured proved to be an eclectic assortment. There have been a number of covers of songs by well-known tunesmiths and all of them had been deconstructed by Wilson in her uniquely indelible means. Sting’s poignant “Fragile” is hauntingly reworked, whereas Bob Dylan’s traditional “Lay Lady Lay” is revamped as a unusual quantity with a jaunty percussive backbeat. Extra subdued is a fragile studying of Willie Nelson’s evergreen nation track “Crazy,” which Wilson makes her personal with a gorgeously sensual but understated efficiency. Much less well-known is jazz singer Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away,” reconfigured right into a skeletal association during which Wilson’s plangent voice is accompanied by Reginald Veal’s eloquent acoustic bass.
One other cowl comes within the form of Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee,” rendered as a countrified ramshackle blues with Brandon Ross including to the agricultural high quality of the efficiency together with his twanging banjo elements.
“If Loving You Is Wrong” is Wilson’s distinctive tackle the Homer Banks-Carl Hampton-Raymond Jackson-penned 70s soul traditional which was successful first for singer Luther Ingram in 1972, when it was launched as “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right.” Wilson offers this steamy story of adultery and illicit love a barely Latin-infused slant with its Spanish guitar filigrees – performed by Fabrizio Sotti, who additionally delivers a positive solo – and mild, undulating percussion.
A potent crystallization
The six remaining songs on Glamoured had been all originals. The dreamy “ Sleight Of Time,” the extra pressing “What Is It?” and the lonesome locomotive blues, “On This Train” (which options Wilson on guitar), had been all co-written by the singer with Sotti, who additionally co-produced the album. Sotti additionally contributed to the frenetic “I Want More,” co-authored with Wilson and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and that includes Gregoire Moiret’s wailing harmonica.
Maret’s dancing chromatic harmonica is extra lyrical on the sensuous and reposeful declaration of affection “Heaven Knows,” one in every of two songs composed by Wilson alone. The opposite is “Broken Drum,” a sluggish, simmering quantity during which jazz, Latin and folks music collide irresistibly.
With its mesmeric mesh of kinds, all unified by Wilson’s husky, seductive, contralto voice, Glamoured stays a potent crystallization of her distinctive fashion and a key entry within the singer’s canon. Its uncommon title took inspiration from the poetry of Irish poet WB Yeats, who used the phrase in its unique Gaelic definition, describing the impact of being whisked away in a dream-like state by fairies. Actually, it’s an apt title as Wilson creates an immersive and spellbinding musical expertise on an album that hit No.2 on Billboard’s High Jazz Albums checklist.
Sixteen years on from its unique launch, followers have the chance to re-evaluate Glamoured on a double-vinyl reissue mastered from the recently-discovered unique analogue tapes. It’s one in every of 18 titles launched in Blue Be aware’s ongoing 2019 Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Collection, for which famous mastering engineer Kevin Grey and producer Joe “Tone Poet” Harley have produced definitive, high-quality editions of the enduring jazz label’s traditional albums. It stands alongside Wayne Shorter’s Etcetera and Chick Corea’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs as one other work destined to impress the audiophiles amongst Blue Be aware followers.
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