Cassandra Wilson, who passed away in September 2026 at age 70, grew up in Jackson, Mississippi caught between her mother's Motown records and her father Herman Fowlkes Jr.'s jazz bass and guitar. Burned out on classical piano and clarinet, she asked her father for guitar lessons and was handed a Mel Bay book and told to figure it out herself, an intuitive, by-ear approach that shaped everything she did afterward. This episode follows her from playing Dorothy in a newly desegregated school's Wizard of Oz to a mass communications degree, coffeehouse gigs, bebop with the Black Arts Music Society, and a television public affairs desk job in New Orleans that mentors Ellis Marsalis and Alvin Batiste urged her to leave.

In New York from 1982, she studied ear training, absorbed Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, and joined Steve Coleman's M-Base colle ...