Cassandra Wilson (1955–2026)

From the New York Times obituary:

“We live very segmented lives,” she told Time magazine in 1996. “There’s Black music and there’s white music. There’s R&B and funk and whatever. This has always bothered me. People don’t see things in streams, they don’t see what tends to connect us all together. That’s what I see. That’s what I try to get at.”

Here’s “The Way You Look Tonight” (Jerome Kern–Dorothy Fields), from the 2015 Billie Holiday homage Coming Forth by Day . The strings are by Van Dyke Parks. You can see the two of them in this short video about the making of the album.