
DATE: Thursday, November 6, 1997            TAG: 9711060716

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MARVIN LAKE, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   80 lines

WILSON HAS HER WAY IN SONG GRAMMY-WINNER THRIVES ON VERSATILITY

NANCY WILSON makes no bones about it: She's not a jazz singer, though many have tagged her as one.

``I'm a song stylist. I'm an interpreter,'' she says. ``I don't think it makes any difference about the music, whether it's jazz, pop or R&B. Because I sing all of that.''

Indeed she does, in a voice that's purringly seductive one second, swingingly bluesy or jazzy the next.

The 60-year-old Chillicothe, Ohio-born Wilson began impressing audiences as a teen-ager.

At age 15, she won a hometown talent contest and ended up with her own television series, ``Skyline Melodies,'' on a local station. She joined Rusty Bryant's Carolyn Club Band in 1956 and eventually moved to New York, where an association with the late alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, then an up-and-coming musician, sparked her career.

She scored her first hit, ``Save Your Love for Me,'' with Adderley. Over the years, she won five Grammy nominations (and a Grammy in 1964 for ``How Glad I Am'') and an Emmy Award for her short-lived NBC-TV series, ``The Nancy Wilson Show,'' in the '60s.

Early in her career Wilson wasn't categorized to the extent performers are today. Mostly, she believes, it's record company and radio stations officials who seem most obsessed with pigeon-holing music.

Wilson's latest - and 60th - release, ``If I Had My Way, was influenced by this phenomenon. The singer decided to do an adult-contemporary album because, she admits, she didn't want her record company ``to have a difficult time with the marketing.''

``They play adult contemporary, and you can just deal with that. As opposed to, `How shall we market her? Should it be jazz or should it be this?' You know, that just gets so old and so tiresome.''

Wilson's biggest influence, she says, has been Jimmy Scott, who has re-emerged as a song stylist after many years off the scene. ``We phrase alike. It's the importance he gives to the lyrics, to the words.''

On ``If I Had My Way,'' however, Wilson positions herself closer to, say, Toni Braxton, whom she admires, than to Scott.

How's the album doing? ``I don't have a clue. I haven't looked at the numbers, haven't asked. People know it's out there.''

So if she recorded an album without worrying who would play it or buy it, what would it be like?

``It would be symphony, strings, ballads. It would be Nancy. It would be stuff I do. It would be very much like `Lush Life.' ''

While she won't commit, Wilson says her next release will be standards. ``That much I know.''

Wilson, the ``stylist,'' often brings a certain dramatic flair to her songs. She's telling a little story, as she does so effectively on her most requested tunes, ``Guess Who I Saw Today'' and ``You Can Have Him.''

At times, though, she can seem affected in her delivery - a fact alluded to by Chicago Sun Times entertainment critic Lloyd Sachs when he mentioned ``the mannerisms and slick acrobatic effects that have long plagued her vocals.''

Wilson dismisses such criticism. ``It doesn't concern me, and there's nothing I can do about it.''

Besides, she adds, sometimes it's going to be that way. ``People come to be entertained. They want to hear a song that they can identify with, and I try to do that.

``Those folks who come in and sit in that seat are not going to have the question or discussion about whether I'm a song stylist or a jazz singer or an R&B singer. That's the farthest thing from their minds.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

Graphic

WANT TO GO?

WHAT: An Elegant Evening with Nancy Wilson

WHEN: Saturday

WHERE: The L. Douglas Wilder Performing Arts Center, Norfolk

State University

TICKETS: $40 and $50, available at TicketMaster locations and the

NSU ticket office

INFO: 683-9009 KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY SINGER

MUSIC