combining members of Wilson's previous working band—guitarist Marvin Sewell, drummer Herlin Riley, and percussionist Lekan Babalola—with bassist Reginald Veal (who has a history with Wilson, and an even longer one in tandem with Riley) and pianist Jonathan Batiste, the latest in a long line of New Orleans-bred piano prodigies, now studying at New York's Juilliard School. Riley and Veal also hail from the Crescent City, so “they already have a backstory,” Wilson says, “and a shared language.” Te musicians revel in Wilson's approach. “Unlike many vocalists, Cassandra doesn't limit musicians to accompaniment,” says Riley. “She allows full expression and input. It's just a reflection of who she is as a person.”


By the time Wilson got to thinking about Silver Pony, she had rented a new home in the French Quarter. She'd lived in New Orleans briefly before, some 30 years ago. In May 2009, Wilson lost her mother, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease. By October of that year, she and her band set out on a 13-city European tour, from Ludwigshafen, Germany to Guimares, Portugal.


“I thought the band had gotten to a point of critical mass,” Wilson says. “I was thinking that I really needed to document this specific group, this chemistry.” Tat chemistry is evident on two opening tracks, “Lover Come Back to Me,” and “St. James Infirmary,” recorded in concert in Granada, Spain. Both tunes were featured on Loverly, but whereas the former had a “1940s feeling” on the previous album, says Wilson, here it's a “postmodern approach to swing,” driven by Riley's powerful brushwork. And the latter deepens its uptempo groove from Loverly, ending in entirely newfound musical territory. “Tere's a natural evolution, once a song gets out into the air,” says Wilson, “something happens to it.”


Impressed as she was with the material recorded on tour, Wilson wished to get the band into the studio. “I thought, ‘Ok I'm going to play some of this stuff for the guys, let them listen to it, and begin to grow ideas out of what we'd done.' And it really did happen.”


Case in point: “Silver Moon,” a tour-de-force that features saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Wilson had found a 20-minute recording drawn from the introduction to “Caravan,” as played in Seville, Spain. (A brief section of this forms the instrumental track, “Silver Pony.”) Wilson played it for her band, and they began to improvise anew, inspired by the live take. Sewell recalls the experience: “It was sort of like a stream-of-consciousness writer who goes back and thinks, 'Man, look at this! Let me go back and build on this, develop it even further.'”


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