Royce Hall Crowd Succumbs to the Cassandra Complex

By Tomm Carroll
Music Critic

March 2 -- Glamoured, the title of interpretive jazz vocalist par excellence Cassandra Wilson’s recent release on Blue Note, is a Gaelic word meaning “to be whisked away.”

“It’s like being in a daydream, those split seconds when you’re transfixed and your eyes don’t move and you have to shake yourself out of it,” Wilson wrote in the press notes.

Seldom has there been a more appropriate moniker for not only an album, but an entire approach to creating music. Needless to say, most of the appreciative audience at UCLA’s Royce Hall last Monday night was indeed “whisked away” into an other-worldly musical space, where the sparse, rhythmic reworking of other songwriters’ material as well as the kindred arrangement of original songs both require and ultimately lead to a new way of listening.

In the case of the covers, you sometimes can’t even identify the song until there’s a lyrical or instrumental phrase that you recognize. And by the time the tune is over, you’ve heard nuances you’ve not noticed before, and you’d swear that Wilson has made the song her own.

Veteran Wilson watchers will recall it was 13 months ago to the day when she and her band debuted many of the songs on Glamoured at a stunning showcase at Hollywood’s Knitting Factory that was as much a rehearsal and an unveiling of works-in-progress as it was a proper gig. And while the excitement of that improvisational and still-developing aspect was missing from the Royce performance, the concert was still an intricate aural study in song construction -- and reconstruction.

So, from the opening twang of Brandon Ross’ banjo-sounding national guitar that led into the revisionist blues of Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee” to the rhythmic tweaking of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March” into a be-bop-bossa nova encore some 80 minutes later, Cassandra and company intrigued, impressed and/or converted or (judging from several walk-outs throughout the show) infuriated and/or confused members of the audience.

But then again, if you aren’t open to reinterpreted versions of hit songs or can’t bear to hear Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” recast as jazzy same-sex erotica, Sting’s “Fragile” as a sultry, sinewy pseudo-samba or Willie Nelson’s (by way of Patsy Cline) “Crazy” as a stripped-down, slowed-down, snap-fingered blues ballad, than Cassandra Wilson is, to quote Mr. Zimmerman, not your cup of meat. The rest of us are willingly whisked away…