Creativity Quote by Cassandra Wilson

The wince in Cassandra Wilson's line is aimed at a label that sounds flattering but lands like a box. "Jazz singer" has decades of cultural baggage: the club-lit archetype, the standards, the idea of a voice as an ornament to a tradition rather than a full instrument with its own authorship. Wilson has spent her career pushing against that narrow silhouette, pulling blues, folk, and indie textures into her records, treating repertoire as raw material instead of a museum exhibit. So the cringe is less insecurity than a refusal to be filed away.

Her substitution is surgical. "Singer" implies category; "vocalist" implies craft. A singer can be anyone with a story and a microphone. A vocalist is someone making choices about phrasing, timbre, rhythm, and space the way a horn player shapes a solo. In jazz, that distinction matters because the genre polices authenticity through lineage. Wilson is claiming the right kind of legitimacy: not "I belong because I resemble your idea of a jazz woman", but "I belong because I'm improvising, composing, and arranging with my voice."

There's also a gendered subtext. Jazz history routinely canonizes instrumental innovators while treating women as interpreters. "Jazz vocalist" recodes her as an agent, not a vessel. It's a small act of self-definition with big implications: she's not rejecting jazz; she's rejecting the way the culture uses jazz as a costume rack for voices it doesn't want to fully credit.