Cassandra Wilson: Glamoured

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Husky-voiced chanteuse Wilson stretched the parameters on Blue Note and her success opened the door for the likes of country-influenced Norah Jones to find a place on what was once a "jazz" label.

As on her previous albums - when she has picked songs by Robert Johnson, Ann Peebles, Joni Mitchell, the Band, Bob Dylan and Jimmy Webb, and covered the Monkees' Last Train to Clarksville - Wilson casts her net wide for material. Here she turns in treatments of Muddy Waters' Honey Bee (snapping acoustic guitar and banjo, low and menacing), Willie Nelson's Crazy (suitably languid and stretching the notes in a way Willie would approve of), a straight take on Sting's Fragile and Dylan's Lay Lady Lay which is given Afro-primal percussion and a slippery, sandpaper vocal. Alongside these are half a dozen excellent originals, notably the light'n'low soul-funk of What Is It?, and the melodically slippery Broken Drum and I Want More.

As always the atmospheric arrangements repay careful attention: two basses and quasi-Spanish guitar on the Dylan; a bass-voice duet with Reginald Veal on Abbey Lincoln's Throw It Away; and the patter of percussion and Afrobeat bass beneath the rapid-fire I Want More (which brings to mind Paul Ubana Jones, as does the bluesy On This Train).

Wilson has seen musical limitations as other peoples' problems and here, as always, goes where few others have, and even fewer will follow. But if you've been down this path you'll know what to expect: the unexpected. But beautiful.

Label: Blue Note/EMI