If you haven’t watched Cassandra Wilson perform onstage, then you haven’t seen in person the being and body of the best jazz singer in the US (if not the whole world). Wilson has no equal in the emotional expression and intellectual command of jazz singing. Also, she moves between the worlds of popular music (the Roots’ “Swept Away”) and high culture (Wynton Marsalis’s “Blood on the Fields”) with exceptional ease. She is at once at home on the streets (hiphop), in the shacks (blues), and in the palaces (modern jazz) of America’s black musical worlds. I worship her. (Triple Door, 216 Union St, tripledoor.net, 7 pm [all ages] and 9:30 pm [21+], $25–$50, May 7–8)

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...