Cassandra Wilson, Grammy-winning jazz vocalist, dies at 70

Cassandra Wilson, whose deep, dark contralto and casual disregard for musical category made her one of the most arresting and influential jazz vocalists of the last 40 years, died on Wednesday in Jackson, Miss.She was 70.Her longtime manager, Robert Torry, announced her death in a statement, without specifying a cause.Wilson was a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, and twice won the Grammy award for Best Jazz Vocal Album: for her eclectic 1996 touchstone, New Moon Daughter and for a 2008 standards program titled Loverly.

She was a major voice and presence in Wynton Marsalis' oratorio Blood on the Fields, which became the first jazz work to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1997.One throughline in Wilson's musical output was the enthralling tether of her voice, whose timbre could inspire metaphors of maplewood smoke or wildflower honey.Another was the mystique she imparted to both original songs and an assortment of material culled from the jazz songbook, the Delta blues, Laurel Canyon folk-rock, even mainstream pop.

New Moon Daughter commingled songs by Neil Young and U2 with those by Hank Williams and Son House; it also included a personal take on "Last Train to Clarksville," the defining 1966 hit for The Monkees.For her 2002 album, Belly of the Sun, Wilson actually recorded in Clarksville, Miss., in a converted train station, pursuing a more tangible connection to home.But there was always a spirit of rustic byways in her music, which she consistently made with first-rate collaborators.

Describing her albums from the early '90s through the mid-aughts, Ben Ratliff once mused in The New York Times that "in essence, they have fed the history of New World popular music, white and black, rural and urban, through a filter of prewar Southern roots music as reimagined by New York jazz musicians." He added: "What a complicated routing system! But it worked, and it didn't sound like anything else."She was born Cassandra Fowlkes in Jackson, Miss., on Dec.4...