Grammy-award winning jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson will release Closer To You: The Pop Side on April 7th via Blue Note / EMI.
With her unmistakable honeyed husky voice, she has made intimate and personal statements with jazz, blues, R&B, country and pop. Closer To You: The Pop Side is a new collection of Wilson’s best covers of pop / rock hits, originally recorded by a who’s-who of top musicians, including U2, Bob Dylan, Glen Campbell, The Band, Sting, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Cyndi Lauper and The Wallflowers.
Closer To You: The Pop Side celebrates the finest pop covers from Wilson’s seven albums recorded with Blue Note during her lengthy tenure with the legendary label.
Wilson won her second Grammy® Award in February, earning the Best Jazz Vocal Album honors for Loverly, her critically acclaimed 2008 Blue Note release. Blue Note Records is celebrating its 70th Anniversary as the world’s premier and longest-running jazz label with special commemorative releases and events throughout 2009.
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For thunderbird, her 2006 Blue Note recording, vocalist Cassandra Wilson explored the outer reaches of jazz with a multilayered sonic approach piloted by pop producer T-Bone Burnett and supported by his A-team of studio musicians including guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Jim Keltner. This time, Wilson ventures into another fascinating direction with “Loverly,” a tantalizing, rhythmically driven collection of jazz standards given new luster with a top-drawer band of friends that includes Marvin Sewell on guitar, Jason Moran on piano, Herlin Riley on drums, Lonnie Plaxico on bass, and Lekan Babalola on percussion, with special guest appearances by bassist Reginald Veal and trumpeter Nicholas Payton.
“I wanted to work with spare arrangements this time,” says Wilson of Loverly, her first full album of standards since her 1988 JMT album Blue Skies. “I decided to dig back into standards with a small, compact group of musicians. I don’t record the typical jazz standards a lot, but I love them and that’s how I honed my craft. I studied the standards, listening to how other singers put their swing into them. But it’s hard to do standards. You can’t really sing them until you understand them.”
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