Cassandra Wilson worked with musicians convened by the alto saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman, with whom she recorded her first few albums some 20 years ago.
I hope you know this is a rehearsal,” said Cassandra Wilson near the close of her first set at the Stone on Saturday night. “No, seriously,” she added. “We just got together today.”
Cassandra Wilson at the Stone in the East Village on Saturday.
If that disclosure took people by surprise, they didn’t show it. Most of the audience had stood in line outside for an hour or longer to hear Ms. Wilson sing in this austere and intimate setting. She was working with musicians convened by the alto saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman, with whom she recorded her first few albums some 20 years ago. The experimental thrust of the evening was largely the point.
There was a deeper point too. Mr. Coleman and Ms. Wilson had agreed on a conceptual framework for their reunion: the West African system of divination known as Ifa, a central feature of Yoruba religious practice. Beside the stage, a posterboard diagram depicted the system’s 16 principal Odu, or stations of the human condition. The group had conceived music for four of them, Ms. Wilson said.
The first one began with a rustling rubato of hand-held shakers and drums and a self-assured invocation by the percussionist Pedro Martinez. Gradually a pulse emerged — four beats, then two, with a polyrhythmic clave pattern running underneath — as Mr. Coleman played one melodic fragment, and the pianist Jason Moran offered another. It was hazy and hypnotic: hardly the standard accompaniment for a jazz singer.
And when Ms. Wilson made her entrance, she was speaking, not singing. “Odu Eji Ogbe,” she pronounced, in a ceremonial cadence. What followed was a regal recitation: “Victory over enemies/Spiritual awakenings/Long life/And peace of mind.” Then came a scrap of song, sung in a deep drawl, as the band swirled around her.
Ms. Wilson seemed deeply happy to be nestled within the ensemble. She traded a few improvised lines with another vocalist, the less commanding but agile Jen Shyu, and occasionally turned around to engage directly with the bassist Lonnie Plaxico and the drummer Dafnis Prieto. The apparent ideal was collective polyphony, rather than an arrangement of accompanists behind a lead.
There were a few bracing solos along the way nonetheless: by the guitarist Marvin Sewell and the tenor saxophonist Yosvany Terry, as well as by Mr. Coleman. And Ms. Wilson ventured some surefooted scat choruses over a rhythmically complex groove halfway through “Oyeku,” a song that she connected lyrically to the blues.
By the end of the set the group had pushed itself toward a churning cohesion. Ms. Wilson was smiling broadly, as was Mr. Coleman. They had pulled off an uneven but impressively exploratory performance, or — perhaps more accurately — a deeply promising rehearsal. The only remaining question is where that preparation will lead.
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