Jazz singer Cassandra Wilson has died at 70

Cassandra Wilson, the jazz singer whose low, smoky contralto carried her far past the jazz audience, has died at 70.

Robert Torre, her manager for 20 years, told the New Jersey radio station WBGO that she died at home in Jackson, Mississippi on the morning of September 1, surrounded by family and close friends. No cause of death has been reported, and her family asked for privacy while arrangements are settled. Jackson's mayor, John Horhn, said the city had "lost an extraordinary native daughter."

She was born in Jackson on December 4, 1955, to a jazz guitarist father, Herman B. Fowlkes, and a schoolteacher mother. She was playing piano at six, took up clarinet in her school's concert and marching bands, taught herself guitar and wrote folk songs, then took a degree in mass communications and sang bebop with the Black Arts Music Society while at college.

After a detour to New Orleans she moved to New York in 1982, studied with the trombonist Grachan Moncur III and the pianist Sadik Hakim, and met the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, becoming a founding vocalist of his M-Base collective. "From Steve Coleman, I learned to tear a piece of music apart and get away from standard approaches," she told Time in 2001, describing learning to hear cycles of rhythm rather than chords.

Her first record as a leader, Point of View, came out on the Munich label JMT in 1986 and was built largely on her own writing. An album of standards, Blue Skies, brought the first wide critical attention. Signing to Blue Note in 1993 produced the run that made her name, starting with Blue Light 'Til Dawn, which folded blues, pop, country and West African music into her jazz.

She followed it with New Moon Daughter, which paired originals with readings of Neil Young, U2, Hank Williams and the Monkees, then Rendezvous with the pianist Jacky Terrasson, Traveling Miles built on Miles Davis, and Loverly, a return to standards. Her last album, Coming Forth by Day, arrived in 2015 as a Billie Holiday homage released on what would have been Holiday's 100th birthday.

She was nominated for four Grammys and won two, for New Moon Daughter and for Loverly, both in jazz vocal categories, and also took the Django d'Or and the Edison Music Award, and was given a Mississippi Blues Trail marker. As a collaborator she recorded with Coleman, Greg Osby and Wynton Marsalis, singing the role of Leona on Blood on the Fields, the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize, and she guested on the Roots' "Silent Treatment."

She never treated the popular repertoire as beneath the form. "I don't have a problem doing music that's popular," she told The New York Times, pointing out that Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker had interpreted the popular music of their own time. Her catalogue remains one of the strongest arguments in modern jazz that the border with soul and blues was always porous. Her death follows that of the British jazz singer Sandra King earlier this year.