Recently awarded the accolade of America's best singer by Time magazine, Cassandra Wilson has been getting back to her Mississippi roots. Her recent album, Belly of the Sun, was recorded in Clarksdale, more or less the official capital of the blues, and the sessions put her in touch with some ancestral musical voices. "It was as if all that I'd learned about music growing up in Mississippi was pushing me forward," she said.
This performance was steeped in the cadences and heat of the blues - specifically in versions of Robert Johnson's Hot Tamales and Mississippi Fred McDowell's earthy You Gotta Move, but also when Wilson and her trio went voyaging beyond 12 bars and outwards into lands that time signatures forgot. Just Another Parade was Latin-flecked and allusive, but spiritually not many miles removed from Darkness on the Delta. Justice - "give me a slice of opportunity, wrap it up real nice for me" - sounded as appropriate now as it would have done 60 years ago.
As a framework for her dark, husky voice, Wilson had brought along Mark Peterson on bass, Jeffrey Haynes on percussion and Marvin Sewell on guitar. Each was given plenty of space to explore, although it was Haynes's gallop around his array of tablas, cymbals and drums, all played with his bare hands, that stood out.
The instrumental combination provided just the right degree of tonal warmth and rhythmic elasticity, as Wilson plotted her course between pop classics and original material. You would not necessarily think of the Monkees' Last Train to Clarksville as a potential jazz standard, but Wilson slowed it down, stretched it out and imbued it with a sense of cracked and infinite weariness. For an encore she seized upon Jimmy Webb's Wichita Lineman, bending it as far as it could go without snapping, but relishing the song's aura of endless space and unfathomable yearning.
On a baking summer evening, A Foggy Day in London Town made a mildly eccentric choice, but seemed to capture something of Wilson's ambivalence about England and the English. She indulged in some mild ribbing of a customer in the front row, and apparently somebody had described her as "mannered", which hadn't gone down at all well. But you can expect a little diva-ish behaviour from as luxuriant a bloom as Cassandra Wilson.
