JAZZ : The Path to Prominence : Cassandra Wilson’s delivery may be understated--no more than a toss of her dreadlocks--but there’s no way you’ll ever miss her point.

‘A song,” says Cassandra Wilson, “always tells me what it needs.”

And Wilson responds to those needs with performances that are casting jazz singing in a dramatically new light.

On stage, there is an almost minimalist quality to the way she approaches her music. No grand gestures, no false theatrics, only a toss of her dreadlocked hair, a slight movement of her hand, or a shift of her hips to make a dramatic musical point--all of it framed by a look that is simultaneously down-home earthy and cutting-edge stylish.

It’s no wonder that she was listed as No. 4 in the New York Daily News’ recent index of “The New York 100 Coolest People.”

“It’s the only way I know how to do it,” Wilson says, continuing her discussion about dealing with the needs of a song. “I think there’s a spiritual element, to begin with--a very strong psychic element, psycho-spiritual, whatever you want to call it--that comes from a song. And it tells you what it needs, instead of the other way around.”

The 40-year-old Mississippi-born singer, who appears in concert at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater on Saturday night, has been following an unusually eclectic musical path since she came to prominence in the early ‘80s with Brooklyn’s jazz avant-garde M-Base collective.

Her albums have ranged across the spectrum from exploratory jazz to warm balladry to rhythm & blues-tinged pop. Despite the high quality of recordings such as “Blue Skies,” a 1988 collection of standards, and her sterling work for Wynton Marsalis’ concert piece “Blood on the Fields,” Wilson, until very recently, has been better known inside the jazz community than to the wider music audience.

“It’s been very cyclical . . . ,” she says. “The first thing I listened to as a kid was jazz, so it made sense after the folk music [what folk music? she hasn’t mentioned it] 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.”

It wasn’t until she signed with Blue Note three years ago that Wilson finally made a breakthrough. Her Grammy-nominated “Blue Light ‘Til Dawn” was one of the three best-selling jazz albums of 1994. In a field in which 100,000 copies is a healthy number, it has sold nearly 300,000 units. A second Blue Note album, “New Moon Daughter,” is scheduled to be released March 5. Wilson will tour Europe and then the United States in support of the CD in March and April.

There’s little doubt that fans of “Blue Light” will be similarly attracted to “New Moon Daughter.” The CD takes Wilson on another stunning musical trip, beginning with the penetrating, Billie Holiday-associated song “Strange Fruit.”

As Wilson puts it,”It was a song,that just said, ‘You’ve got to do me.’ ”

Among the recording’s other highlights: Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” standards such as “Skylark” and five Wilson originals.

“Blue Light ‘Til Dawn” and “New Moon Daughter,” strikingly different from her previous outings, are the result of a unique, musically intimate collaboration between Wilson and producer Craig Street.

The collaboration was a risky coming-together between a talented singer on an uneven career path and a producer just beginning to find his way in the music business. But the encounter struck sparks.

If listening to what the songs tell her represents one vital element in Wilson’s ascendancy to the top level of performance, then her creative affiliation with Street is surely the other indispensable factor in her growing success.

Street, in his 30s, has a background as a musician, radio programmer and photographer--all of which have contributed to his view that “a lot of what we do as human beings is production. The material may be different, but the approach to how to be a chef, or a construction worker, deals with their material, how they process it to an end result, is the same.”

When Wilson signed with Blue Note, she and Street--who knew each other from the downtown New York jazz scene--were living in the same building.

“I went down to get the mail one day,” recalls Street, “and ran into Cassandra. She’d just made her record deal, and told me, ‘Oh, man, they’re looking at all these big-name producers. I’m afraid of what they’re going to do to me.’

“So I asked her what kind of record she wanted to make, and she told me about this idea of doing a collection of R&B; covers. Well, we’d always been very straight with each other, so I said, ‘Cassandra, that’s the lamest idea I ever heard. A jazz singer doing R&B; covers? Why?’

“And she told me she wanted to do music that influenced her when she was a kid. And I said, ‘C’mon, Cassandra, I know you listened to Marvin Gaye and all that stuff, but you’re the one that told me that Joni Mitchell had more to do with your development as a woman than anyone in the world.’ ”

The conversation eventually resolved into what Street describes as a “bizarre sort of synchronistic thing, in which she kind of asked and I kind of volunteered to produce the album.”

It was a momentous decision for both, and one that required a certain amount of persuasion at the record company. The fact that Blue Note President Bruce Lundvall was familiar with Street’s previous work was a plus. Even so, Street was asked to produce some demo tracks with Wilson. They came up with versions of “Tupelo Honey” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” which Lundvall liked so much that they wound up on “Blue Light.”

The interpretations are almost beyond category, tinged with acoustic guitars, violin and indefinable rhythmic tapping and percussion. Rooted in jazz, they reach out to find compatible, always-evocative associations with blues and pop without losing their essential musical identities.

Wilson was not surprised at the successful results.

“Craig and I have our arguments,” she says. “Sometimes one of us gives in, and sometimes the other. But the important thing is that our personalities really mesh musically.”

Jazz recordings are rarely assembled with the same production methods that are common in pop music. Many jazz producers are content to sit back and let the music take place. Street, whose personal history includes the performance and production of rock, R&B; and jazz, and who, ironically, had never had a produced album released before “Blue Light,” had other ideas. He was determined--with Wilson’s approval--to create a recording with the same concern for detail and nuance typical of pop music production.

“There are all kinds of producers,” Street says. “You’ve got the big arranging producers who set up everything and then just bring in a voice to drop on top of it. You’ve got the completely neutral producers; some of them don’t even want to be called producers. And you’ve got guys who cross the line--dictating songs, dictating instruments, dictating everything.

“The producers I respect the most are those who try to create as good a representation as possible of what it is that the artist wanted to do.”

In the case of “Blue Light,” as well as “New Moon Daughter,” the production and the program reflect Wilson’s desire to develop a jazz repertoire and a form of vocalized jazz expression which is not limited to the familiar reliance upon standards.

“The singers who were singing the standard repertoire--Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday--were singing the popular music of the period,” Wilson says. “But the language changes. And I think that’s part of the problem. When a jazz singer today does what is considered the standard repertoire--music from the ‘30s or ‘40s--there’s this dissonance. It’s music from another time. It doesn’t quite express how we live. And that’s very important for music--the way in which it parallels our lives.”

Despite Street’s reassurances, working with the producer meant that Wilson had to give up a substantial degree of control to achieve this goal. “It was difficult in the beginning,” she says, “because I had to learn how to surrender. Surrender is always difficult. And it’s something that we both had to learn how to do.”

Street agrees, if for slightly differing reasons.

“Cassandra’s right. The first album was difficult. Because I was taking her someplace that she had never been. It was like she was saying, ‘I can’t do that,’ and suddenly somebody was taking her there, anyhow.”

“Blue Light” wound up with a program that included songs by Mitchell, Van Morrison and Ann Peebles, as well as two excoriating renderings of songs by blues legend Robert Johnson. The settings were tailor-made for Wilson’s dark, smoky sound--filled with startlingly unexpected acoustic combinations of stringed instruments and percussion.

The recording also embraced Street’s desire to find settings that explored unusual timbres and textures, while, at the same time, pushing open the edges of traditional envelopes of style and manner.

“I don’t have any rules,” he says. “So, with Cassandra, it was like, ‘Let’s find some good textures to go with these good songs and try to get a good performance.’ But then I wanted to throw in a little subversiveness too: mess with people’s minds, go into places that artists are usually afraid of, go over the top. To me, that’s what jazz is about: taking risks, taking it to the edge, going a little bit out of control and then bringing it back in.”

The risks, obviously, all paid off, creatively and financially. Buoyed by the success of “Blue Light ‘Til Dawn,” Wilson won Down Beat magazine’s “Top Female Vocalist” award in 1994 and in 1995 (the first singer of her generation to receive the award) and was named Rolling Stone’s “Hot Jazz Artist of the Year.”

It’s an impressive set of achievements for a woman who grew up in Jackson, Miss., singing folk songs to the accompaniment of her own guitar playing. After receiving a degree from Jackson State University in mass communications, she 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.” A move to New York City in the ‘80s put her back on the music track that led to “Blue Light” and “New Moon Daughter.”

Wilson’s second Blue Note recording arrives two years after her first, a considerable stretch in a business that prefers to see successful albums followed by even more successful albums. Characteristically, however, Wilson seems unfazed by the pressure to produce a follow-up recording.

“I just felt that we wanted to let ‘Blue Light’ have its time,” she explains. “I think it’s good for the music--let it have a natural life. And it gave us the space and time to begin to think about the connection between ‘Blue Light’ and ‘New Moon,’ and write new material that made sense. We were able to work out several of the original pieces before we even went into the studio.”

Street, who spent the hiatus between the albums producing a well-received Holly Cole album of Tom Waits songs and a jazz recording by tenor saxophonist Teodross Avery, was primarily concerned that “Blue Light” have an appropriate hearing with jazz fans and with the general music audience. Aware that Wilson has been criticized by some for her varied programming and colorful stylistic choices, he expresses confidence in the public’s ability to simply respond to good music.

“I’m not worried about what the jazz police say--that you can do this and you can’t do that,” he says. “People don’t categorize stuff as much as the record companies and the critics. People just buy what they like. And I think they’re beginning to come to accept Cassandra’s range in the same way that they accept--despite the difference in styles--Bonnie Raitt or Rickie Lee Jones.”

Street sees “New Moon Daughter” as a giant step up from “Blue Light,” and an accurate reflection of the work that he and Williams do together.

“It’s very collaborative,” he says. “It’s about both of us knowing what the other one is capable of doing, and constantly pushing on one another. She expects me to push on her, and to take her to places that she might not even want to go. And I expect her to offer resistance. And then somewhere in the middle of it, we find something that works.”

What works, in the case of “New Moon Daughter,” is a set of performances that thoroughly confirm Wilson’s belief that a song tells her “what it needs.” Her interpretations of “Strange Fruit,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and U2’s “Love Is Blindness” are the utterances of an artist who has reached creative maturity by walking the razor’s edge of emotional risk.

“These are difficult, even painful songs to do,” Wilson says. “All of us are uncomfortable with the pain of loneliness and alienation. But the emotions are real, and when songs are right, that’s what they can do. They work on sense memory. They work on you spiritually. And they work on where you’re living.”

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Cassandra Wilson appears Saturday at Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Wilshire Boulevard west of the 405 Freeway. 8 pm. $26.50-$29.50. PHONE???