Silver Pony, the title of Cassandra Wilson’s new album, comes from an incident that occurred when she was a young child.
When the accomplished, multi-Grammy-winning musician was four, a man with a pony and a camera suddenly appeared in her neighbourhood. ‘Pay to get your picture taken,” the mysterious man said. Both her brothers refused but, with her mother’s consent, Wilson took the challenge. The resultant image is on the cover of the CD.
The 11-track album contains both live recordings from her Spanish tour and material gleaned from sessions at New Orleans’s Piety Street Studios. The applause of the audience is understated and never overwhelms the otherwise studio feel of the album. One of the beautiful features of the album, a practice usually employed at live concerts, is the way one track neatly segues into the next, for instance, the percussive A Night in Seville slides unannounced into the bass-heavy Beneath a Silver Moon, on which Ravi Coltrane is featured.
The album consists of standards, pop, blues and her own compositions; some of the songs Wilson has redone include compositions by Stevie Wonder (If it’s Magic), Paul McCartney (Blackbird) and Bernard Roth’s blues composition, Forty Days and Forty Nights.
Certain offerings by accomplished vocalists at times feel as though they are riding over an atrophied sound, as if working on the premise that the voice and not the instrumentation will carry the music. That’s not the pattern of this album. Wilson has featured accomplished musicians including Coltrane (son of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane) on Beneath a Silver Moon and R&B sensation John Legend (voice and piano) features on the last track, Watch the Sunrise.
Bluesy accents
Other seasoned musicians are Marvin Sewell on electric guitar, Jonathan Batiste on piano, Reginald Veal on electric bass, Herlin Riley on drums and Lekan Babalola on percussion. Each of these musicians is given space to showcase their various strengths and talents, but this never overwhelms Wilson’s rich contralto and its natural inclination to explore the depths of the blues and the highs of the jazz sound.
The album is, in a sense, a journey. Every song is an imprint of where she has been. The singer, who was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up listening to pop, blues and jazz, brings all this history to this CD.
The bluesy accents of New Orleans, where she lived for a while, come alive on the track Saddle up My Pony (written by Delta Blues maestro Charley Patton).
On Wonder’s If It’s Magic Wilson offers a measured, spare rendition and her collaboration with Legend on Watch the Sunrise is a good-natured duel by two great musicians; it shows her ability to hold her own in the presence of one of today’s R&B greats. Silver Pony is an accomplished CD.