"’Glamoured’ is a Gaelic word meaning ‘to be whisked away,’" says vocalist, producer, and songwriter Cassandra Wilson, explaining the title of her new album on Blue Note Records. "It's like being in a daydream, those split seconds when you're transfixed and your eyes don't move and you have to shake yourself out of it. This album captures the feeling of that reverie."

Indeed, Wilson sets such a mood with her trademark mix of first-rate originals and adventurous covers of other songwriters' works, this time picking material by Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Sting, Abbey Lincoln and Willie Nelson. Such eclectic tastes come naturally to Wilson, who began her musical career performing in and around her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. "Down South, musicians have to be able to play in many different circumstances and in many contexts," she says. "They have to play jazz, they have to integrate the blues, rhythm and blues, and they have to know a little country. And the lines are blurred sometimes, because that's what everybody wants to hear."

These days, Wilson is recognized as an unequaled vocalist, a jazz singer for a new generation. Her distinctive style and daring aesthetic have earned her wide recognition, including chart-topping albums, a Grammy and countless media accolades, such as Time Magazine's 2001 pick for America's Best Singer.

Still, those Mississippi roots run deep, and so for the recording of Glamoured—her 14th album as a leader—Wilson began in one direction, returning to her hometown in Mississippi, and then finished the record in a completely unexpected way in New York, collaborating with the multi-faceted Italian producer, guitarist and composer Fabrizio Sotti.

Wilson assembled a top-notch band for the Mississippi sessions, including longtime cohorts guitarist Brandon Ross and percussionist Jeffrey Haynes as well as harmonica player Gregoire Maret, bassists Reginald Veal and Calvin Jones, and drummer Herlin Riley. Those dates produced two Wilson originals, which were later re-vamped with the help of Sotti (the dreamy "Broken Drum" and the silky bossa nova "Heaven Knows") along with unique interpretations of Muddy Waters's "Honey Bee”—heard here in Ross’s sensuously spare arrangement with a churning triplet feel—and Dylan's "Lay, Lady, Lay," rearranged and contextualized by Wilson with a loping bass chant that anchors her liquid syncopation.

For the rich bass-and-vocal duet on Abbey Lincoln's "Throw it Away," Wilson first called the legendary vocalist for permission. "She said, 'Yeah, of course, I'd love for you to do it…and check out this last verse,’” Wilson says, recalling her surprise that Lincoln had written but not recorded a third stanza. "I think that song is saying that you can't lose the things that really matter. We have become so obsessed with material wealth. This song expresses the joy one can find when you release that attachment and discover those things in your life of true value—freedom, love, and the pursuit of your dreams. That last verse is crucial. I was really excited that she gave that to me, it felt as if she were giving me her blessing to do her song." Veal’s bass accompaniment simultaneously anchors and expounds upon the poignancy of the lyric.

The final song recorded in Mississippi was the lovers' lament "Crazy," a Willie Nelson original most famously covered by Patsy Cline. Here Ross transforms one of Wilson’s melodic experiments into a dreamy set-up for the intro and Haynes offers some of his most intense yet delicate handiwork on percussion. "It was late at night, and we were packing up because we had to get on the bus," Wilson remembers. "I love songs like this that happen at the end of recording sessions. Everyone wants to get out and they're just so tired, everyone's guard is down in a sense. There's a certain kind of reckless abandon that creeps into the interpretation of the music, which in turn feeds, the emotional setting for the lyric."

And so it was a wrap—except for a lingering feeling. "After the dates in Jackson, I was really pleased with what we had, but I wanted to take some time out to reflect and gather more information," Wilson says. "I just knew there was something else that needed to be done, but I didn't know what."

Back in New York City, Wilson found the answer she had been searching for, when her path crossed producer Fabrizio Sotti’s—and with that the creative process veered in another direction. "Fabrizio and I met and had an instant rapport," she says. "We talked a second time right after the Mississippi sessions, and I said 'Can you help me finish this record? Because I'm lost.' He intrigued me—he has a strong jazz background but he's living in a hip-hop world, and I thought it would be interesting to see what he could bring to a project where jazz is the foundation. I don't know why I trusted him, but I'm like that. I believe in letting events carry you instead of trying to direct everything."

Following her intuition, Wilson booked additional studio time in New York City with Sotti on board as guitarist and producer. Recorded there were three exceptional originals ("I Want More," "Sleight of Time" and "What Is It?" co-written by Wilson and Sotti) along with Sting's "Fragile," which has recently taken on greater meaning as an evocative 9/11 tribute; Wilson's brilliant "On This Train," an insistent groove that rides on Sotti's shimmering, time-stretching guitar; and additional seasoning for the '70s soul ballad "If Loving You Is Wrong." Although the original tracks for the latter were recorded in Mississippi, Sotti added a special treatment in the subsequent New York sessions. "I love that song," Wilson says. "My mother used to play it—the Percy Sledge version—over and over again when I was a little girl. Dylan's 'Lay, Lady, Lay' is a song I remember from my college days, when you could hear everything on the radio, black music, white music, there were no barriers."

The connection that Wilson felt with Sotti was mutual, "I’ve worked with a lot of singers in the past, but with Cassandra, I felt she brought much more. She’s got the whole package—she’s a total musician," Sotti says.

The vitality of the New York dates comes out in "I Want More," a song that originated with Sotti and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. "That is definitely a drummer's song," Wilson says. "Terri Lyne just started playing this beat, trying to lose everybody." Sotti chimed in with a motif and Wilson then figured out a bass line, and the rest of the band joined in (including harmonica man Gregoire Maret, who delivers a phenomenal solo). "The melody and lyrics of that song fall somewhere between speaking and singing—it's an allusion to rap but it's not rap. There are so many words to it, and the rhythm almost demands that you speak it."

But it is another song about the drum—"Broken Drum," a Wilson original recorded in Mississippi—that conveys the weight of Glamoured. "There's an Ashanti proverb that refers to the custom of playing the drum whenever the moon would be on the wane," Wilson says. "And the reason they would play the drum was to revive the moon from its impending doom, its death. So it's saying that even a broken drum can save the moon—meaning, it's the faith you maintain even when your resources seem limited, and the effort you make regardless of circumstances, that ultimately makes the difference in our lives."