From the heart, not the genre

Cassandra Wilson started it.

If that sounds accusatory in a finger-pointing way, it’s not meant to. Rather it is an attempt to wander back to the source of a circular debate that keeps jazz purists persistently in knots and the pop world head-scratching.

When Wilson’s first Blue Note album, “Blue Light ‘Til Dawn,” arrived almost 10 years ago, listeners were taken by her startlingly forthright voice, her unusual phrasing -- and most remarkably by a collection of tunes and arrangements that for a “jazz singer” boldly traversed musical borders.

She didn’t sound like Sassy or Carmen, Dinah or Billie. Not outright anyway. Nor, for that matter, did she sound like Nina Simone or Betty Carter -- women who, like her, walk around the basement of their voices.

But that was the point.

In the years since, there have been chanteuses who don the gown and stand before the band to sing tunes that resemble jazz in a familial but twice-removed sort of way. Some -- Diana Krall, Jane Monheit -- make more of an imprint than others.

But Wilson is different. With each recording, she’s refused to fall into ruts or become some sort of mothballed jazz cliche. “For better or worse,” she says during an interview while in town for a trio of shows at the Knitting Factory, in a speaking voice that is as deep-in-the-woods as her singing instrument. It’s followed by a laugh that suggests she constantly weighs the price paid for making the choices she has along the way.

Her latest, “Belly of the Sun,” released last spring, took Wilson out on a limb even farther. Choosing passion over pragmatism, she’s become a high-profile example of what following one’s bliss might bestow. Her role as a rule-bending trailblazer has already influenced pop sensation Norah Jones, who cites Wilson as a “liberating influence” in her own move from her jazz roots to pop and jazz material.

Just hours before Thursday’s opening show at the Knitting Factory, she muses about her past, her idiosyncratic trajectory. Wilson figures she knows no other way to approach her work -- both its selection and its rendering -- because from the beginning singing wasn’t a choice. It just was.

“I’ve been singing since I was 5 years old. Not in-the-church-thing kind of way. I always made up music. Since I was a little girl. Improvisation was with me from the beginning. It drove my parents crazy,” she says in a warm, storytelling voice, as faraway as the Jackson, Miss., memory. “I would sing all the time. To anything. Television show themes. I loved to imitate the sounds.”

Those “sounds” ultimately translated into colors, or feelings, sense memories -- a palette from which Wilson creates stunning, aural wraparound canvases.

Choosing a song, or having it choose her, then, has much less to do with what genre -- jazz or pop, blues or folk -- it finds itself situated in, says Wilson, than how it sits in her soul. “It doesn’t go away. Some songs are so strong they kind of lodge themselves in your consciousness and you can’t escape them.... It resonates.”

What resonates on stage, then, might be Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” or the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” as well as Jobim’s “Waters of March,” as it did Thursday night while Wilson sauntered around the narrow space between the musicians, not in a gown but in a clingy wrap-around skirt, blouse and, briefly, sandals that she quickly removed and kicked to the side.

Not everyone, Wilson knows, will agree with her choices. This ongoing debate about jazz, about jazz protectionism, “I don’t tune out,” she says. “I understand why people are confused. I think if I were in their shoes I would be confused too. I don’t harbor any ill feelings about those who look at it and say, ‘This isn’t jazz.’ I, on the other hand, believe that it is jazz. And it’s very strong evidence of the flexibility of jazz and the elasticity of the form.”

Much of it she ascribes to fear “of the unknown. And also mis-education about the origins and functions of the music. It’s not meant to stand still and be etched in stone.”

If pushed to describe what she’s after as a singer, it wouldn’t be choosing a tag, jazz or pop: “An explorer. An emotional explorer. It gets kind of rough. A song like ‘Love Is Blindness’ was perilous for me. Also ‘Strange Fruit.’ ... But I like the difficulty. It forces me to confront maybe what are hidden agendas. Hidden emotions. It’s like psychotherapy.”

It’s more than moxie, it’s getting to the source of things for the sake of honesty and confronting fear. “Miles Davis is the biggest influence on that aspect of what I do. He always seemed to be a singer with the way that he was able to tap into the emotional core of a song and just tear you apart.”

Wilson knows that, in a time of strict categories, her own guiding philosophy -- “be yourself and follow your muse” -- might sound simplistic, even naive. “It’s difficult not to get the calls, not get the recognition. But it’s so important to stretch and make mistakes. To fall and to fail. You have to know who you are. Know what it takes to do what you do. I know I need that kind of fearlessness -- or fearfulness -- for my work. It’s both sides of the same coin. When I walk out, I always think: ‘This is the last time I have to do this. Let me do it right.’ ”

In that fashion, at the Knitting Factory she did tip her hat to Muddy Waters as if it were his last rites. For most of the set, Wilson leisurely swam around the expanse of her last blues-inflected album, even slipping into her crowd-pleaser “Drunk as Cooter Brown,” hand at her hip, sipping a glass of red wine, shaking her cascade of blond dreadlocks.

Wilson is not ready to let go of this material -- not yet. “I know you’re supposed to set goals for yourself. I see all that motivational stuff on television. ‘Think about the future, what’s next!’ ” she reflects with a laugh. “But I’m all into the journey. It’s fascinating to me. So if I make certain what I want moment to moment, I’m cool at the crossroads.”

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Cassandra Wilson

Where: Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: Today, 7 p.m.

Price: $30

Contact: (323) 463-0204