Cassandra Wilson, Cultural Centre Concert Hall, Saturday March 21, 2015
Coming Forth By Day, Cassandra Wilson’s tribute to Billie Holiday, the centenary of whose birth falls on April 7, won’t be released until that date, although advance copies were available for sale before and after the first night of her Hong Kong Arts Festival performances.
Consequently I, and presumably most of the rest of the audience, had little to base expectations on beyond some You Tube promotional clips, although she began touring the show in February.
Wilson has come to Hong Hong straight from three nights at the Blue Note jazz club in Tokyo, and those performances, and two for the Hong Kong Arts Festival, are her only Asian dates.
The first night was well attended, and an appreciative crowd heard Wilson and her band, already well rehearsed it seems, perform an electric 21st century re-imagining of some of the obvious, and some of the less obvious, highlights of the Lady Day repertoire.
The songs, including Good Morning Heartache, You Go My Head, The Way You Look Tonight, and God Bless The Child have been re-imagined in the kind of twang guitar Americana idiom in which Bill Frisell specialises.