- 'Coming Forth By Day' Liner Notes | Shore Fire Media

Coming Forth By Day

Release date: April 7, 2015
Label: Sony Legacy

Cassandra Wilson
Coming Forth by Day

(Legacy 88875063622)
Available April 7, 2015

 

Liner Notes

 

Somewhere in our collective conscious, in that place where imagination and fact intermingle, where myths come alive and legends walk among us, there’s a smoke-filled bar at the end of a dimly lit alley. It’s strangely familiar even before we enter. We walk down a few steps and inside, the bartender already knows our name and what we drink. The singer fronting the small band on the stage in the corner knows exactly what we want to hear. She stands there, a tight spotlight bathing her face and hands and the white gardenia behind her left ear, looking our way. We nod, the band briefly sets the mood and she starts singing. That voice we know so well floats toward us, tinged with melancholy, but not overtly sad. It swings but lazily, like its caught up in its own thoughts, giving it a heavy eye-lid feel. The rapture begins.

 

The sound and spirit of Billie Holiday lives on in our ears and our imagination. Her music is woven so deeply into the culture we share that it surrounds us, never mind the musical era or style. Her influence comes through that signature sound: that hushed feeling of interiority, that undercurrent of melancholy, that sense of a deeply private emotional moment revealed. Her favorite producer once said that she connects with the heartbreak in all of us. It’s true; Billie remains the Lady of Perpetual Sorrow—her appeal as singular as it is universal. All generations include singers who have followed her and paid tribute—channeling her sound, her songbook, her spirit.

 

Coming Forth By Day is the spirit of Billie both revived and reimagined in a modern context, sacrificing neither the emotional depth nor an abiding, earthy sense of the blues. There’s a lot of space and air, appropriately so, allowing the music and words to breathe at their own pace, plus a generous range of surprises—moods and musical flavors—that are never inappropriate.

 

A subtle samba threading through “All Of Me”. The rhythm-and-strings, Philly soul feel of “You Go To My Head”. “Strange Fruit” tells its harrowing tale through a series of impassioned crescendos and soft retreats, acoustic instruments and electronic effects weaving a tapestry of anguish and despair. “I’ll Be Seeing You”, the penultimate track, is the sun finally peeking through the clouds, voice, piano, cellos and percussion all glimmering with hope.

 

An “anything goes”, updated approach unites these songs, tempered by musical choices that reflect a clarity of intent and a judicious balance of light and dark, past and present. As a disarming intimacy is Billie’s currency, this is the provenance of Cassandra Wilson.

 

Wilson is one who thinks long and hard about a project before taking it on. The notion of recording a tribute to Billie was first suggested to her by longtime friend Bruce Lundvall, the former head of the Blue Note label, to mark the centenary of Billie’s birth. She admits that the idea was neither inappropriate nor daunting.

 

“I never feel intimidated. I always feel challenged, and it made sense,” says Wilson. “I’m part of this legacy—I come from Billie by way of Abbey Lincoln. I know I’m in that line of singers but I also know myself. I purposefully did not listen to other tributes because my way is unique and I serve it best by focusing on that.”

 

The other suggestion that shaped Coming Forth By Day came from Wilson’s manager Ed Gerrard—working with a producer whose long history in the worlds of rock and pop (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Arcade Fire, Public Image, Ltd.) created iconic recordings that maintain a raw edginess, favoring texture and darkened mood.

 

“Nick Launay is Nick Cave’s longtime producer and I fell in love with him the moment I met him,” Wilson recalls. “I could tell he has a thorough understanding of music and how it works on the psyche, and is not stuck in just one style or idea. I knew I could trust him to be flexible and open. I need that because I’m more of an un-producer on my own recordings. I need to be the one who puts things in place, stands back and then allows circumstance and chance to transpire in their own way. Nick understands that. He remembers everything, every nuance of each song as we went along. That’s a great producer and that’s how these songs came together.”

 

With Launay joining the project, a few masters from the same musical territory followed. The Bad Seeds’ rhythm section—drummer Thomas Wydler and bassist Martyn P. Casey—guitarists T. Bone Burnett and Nick Zinner of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, all opted in. Eminent arranger Van Dyke Parks handled the strings, and Wilson brought in two of her longtime collaborators, pianist Jon Cowherd and guitarist Kevin Breit. Saxophonist Robby Marshall joined as well.

 

 “Last Song” is the album’s sole original tune, Wilson’s personal evocation of one of Billie’s legendary relationships coming to a sad close. “It’s based on her feelings when her musical soul mate Lester Young died. He was the one who gave her the name Lady Day. She had never patched up their friendship after some argument and she was not allowed to sing at his funeral which of course devastated her. It was simply not the way she had wanted to say goodbye, so the song is putting into music what she could not do in person.”

 

 “Coming Forth By Day” is a loose translation of the actual title of the Egyptian Book Of The Dead. In choosing that same name for the album, Wilson notes that her intent was not to recreate the songs in the same style as Billie, but rather “to find her essence, the sacred center of her spirit and bring it through our treatment of her songs. That book Coming Forth By Day contains incantations—musical spells—that help guide the spirit of the deceased through the afterlife to reemerge into physical form.

 

“I felt that was exactly what we were doing—bringing Billie into a new day, and giving the music a fresh, 21st Century expression. I have a strong feeling that if she were around today she’d understand what we did, and I’m sure she would not want to hear someone singing a song in exactly the same way that she did it back in 1941 or ’51.”

 

Billie Holiday is still singing in that bar we can visit anytime. We just close our eyes, smell the smoke, sip our drink, and hear her voice. To some, her band plays with a gentle swing that carries us back to a long gone era. To others, like Cassandra Wilson, her band is playing the same songs but in a way that carries Billie’s spirit forward with a more modern spell—music that is Coming Forth By Day. Lady Day that is.

 

-- Ashley Kahn

Ashley Kahn is a music author, historian and educator. His books include A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, among other titles.