Postscript: Cassandra Wilson 1955 - 2026

Cassandra Wilson (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito)

I see in the Times that Cassandra Wilson has died. She’s one of my favorite jazz singers. What a voice! Low and smoky. Gary Giddins, in his New Yorker review of her superb 2008 album Loverly, said this:

Wilson has always thrived on rhythmic complexity, but her best work, including “Loverly,” balances it with melodic, harmonic, and verbal nuances that transform evergreens into personal deliberations, frequently underscored with an ironic eroticism. 

Giddins identified three of her attributes as a singer: “the husky timbre, which favors her lower register; an affinity for melodic embellishments replete with sighs and moans; and a canny back-of-the-beat rhythmic attack.”

I’d add a fourth: interpretive genius. Her renditions of “Skylark,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Wichita Lineman,” “O Sole Mio,” “Black Orpheus,” to name just a few, are brilliant. Her version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is magic. Once heard, never forgotten. She’s gone now – way too soon. Her albums will live on. She joins Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as one of the greatest jazz singers of all time. 

Celebrity Obsessed: The Talk of the Town Special Issue

Where are the zipper fixers, oven repairmen, dog washers, and pigeon mumblers? Where’s the balloon aeronaut? Where’s Doc Sternbach? They’re all interesting people. They all appeared in Talk of the Town. Why aren’t they in The Talk of the Town Special Issue? I open its pages and all I find are celebrities. Ugh! It’s a collection of all the stories I skipped (except for one or two) when they appeared in the magazine. Do I care that James Franco has “a glaze of coffee on his teeth”? No! Am I interested in the fact that Prince eats carrot soup, Janet Reno’s eyeglasses are “a bit smudged,” Ellen Barkin has four herniated disks? No, no, and no. Do I need to know that Cindy Adams says, “I have more hair under my arms than Juicy has on her whole body”? I don’t think so. Juicy is a dog, by the way. The Special Issue comprises fifty Talk of the Town pieces from the last decade, and not one of them is about an unfamous person. Why isn’t Robert Sullivan’s great Talk story about the woman who investigated the history of a hundred and seventeen year old piece of cheese (“Say Cheese,” September 13, 2010) included? Where’s Ian Frazier’s memorable Talk piece about the Naked Cowboy (“Nude Dude,” August 24, 2009)? Where is Mark Singer’s Talk story about Reid Stowe and his attempt to sail for a thousand days (“A Thousand Days,” February 15, 2010)? I know it’s impossible to include everything. And not everyone shares my interest in under-the-radar-type characters. But couldn’t there have been at least one or two stories in the Special Issue about “ordinary,” i.e., non-celebrity, but larger than life human beings? Frazier, Singer, and Sullivan are among the finest Talk writers in the magazine’s history. Their work should be represented in an issue that claims to contain “highlights from the past ten years of The Talk of the Town.” To find them absent is, to say the least, disappointing.

But I'll get over it. Of the Special Issue’s fifty pieces, which one do I like the best? That’s easy: Nick Paumgarten’s “Skype Chat.” It’s a transcript of a conversation between Jonathan Demme and Neil Young, conducted via Skype. The conversation itself is very funny, but what I like most are the italicized bits in which Paumgarten describes the process (e.g., “Young faces the camera – eye contact, of a kind. On the laptop, his image breaks apart, and his voice burbles. There is something warm and archaic about Skype’s flaws. A Skype call can feel like a telegram. ‘It’s so fragile,’ Demme says, ‘It’s sweet’”). The piece is illustrated by Tom Bachtell’s brilliant full-page drawing of Young playing the guitar. “Skype Chat” is one of Paumgarten’s two Neil Young Talk pieces. The other one is called “Request Line” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2008). It’s about a Neil Young concert held at Christ United Church’s Palace Cathedral. It’s not included in the Special Issue, but it’s well worth checking out.

Neil Young (Illustration by Tom Bachtell)