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Dates Appearing: July 5 - 9 Current Release: New Moon Daughter |
Born in Jackson, Mississippi to a musical family (her father was guitarist and bassist Herman Fowlkes), Wilson studied piano from the age of nine and began writing her own songs on guitar at age 12. By age 19, she started performing folk material around Mississippi and Arkansas and gradually became immersed in jazz while studying with Alvin Fielder and singing with the Black Arts Music Society in Jackson. By 1981, she relocated to New Orleans and began a career in broadcasting. "I had just gotten my degree in mass communications from Jackson State University and was working as the assistant public affairs director of a local television station in New Orleans," she recalls. "At that point, I just assumed that television would be the thing that I would do as a career. But still, the music was the most important thing for me."
Wilson pursued her musical interests on the side and eventually met New Orleans saxophonist Earl Turbinton, who became an important mentor for her. "I was making a transition from a folk period, where Joni Mitchell was all I was really interested in, and going from that into jazz. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter. And my voice at that point was still very high. It didn't have any of the coloration that I have now. It might have had traces of it, but it certainly wasn't as deep and dark as it is now."
That naturally smoky, sultry voice has now graced nine albums as a leader and another dozen as a featured vocalist with Steve Coleman and Five Elements, the M-Base Collective, New Air and Bob Belden's Manhattan Rhythm Club. After her '70s folk phase and her investigation of jazz after a move to New York City in the '80s, Wilson has come full circle back to the folk, pop and blues music that initially stirred her soul. And she's tackling this material in the spirit of a true jazz singer. "It's been very cyclical, you know," she says. "Of course, the first thing I listened to as a kid was jazz so it made sense after the folk music to come back to jazz. And now it makes just as much sense for me to be singing tunes by Joni Mitchell, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and the Monkees."
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