The world first learned of the incredible vocal artistry of Cécile McLorin
Salvant when she won the prestigious 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz
Competition. In just under the span of a decade she has evolved from a darling
of jazz critics and fans, to a multi-GRAMMY® Award winner, to a prescient and
fearless voice in music today.
In life and in music, McLorin Salvant’s path has been unorthodox. The child
of a French mother and Haitian father, she was raised in the rich cultural and
musical mix of Miami. She began formal piano studies at age five and started
singing with the Miami Choral Society at age eight. Growing up in a bilingual
household, she was exposed to a wide variety of music from around the world
through her parents wide-ranging record collection. While jazz was part of this
rich mix, her adolescent and teenage years were focused on singing classical
music and Broadway. Following her desire to study abroad, she enrolled in
college (Aix-en-Provence in the south of France) to study opera and law.
Ironically, it was in France that McLorin Salvant began to really discover the
deep roots of jazz and American music, with the guidance of instructor and jazz
saxophonist, Jean-François Bonnel. Bonnel’s mentoring included bringing
McLorin Salvant stacks of CDs, covering the work of jazz and blues legends as
well as its lesser-known contributors. Working through these recordings, McLorin
Salvant began building the foundation needed to thrive and occupy a special
place in the august company of her predecessors.
Three years later, McLorin Salvant returned to the US to compete in the
prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. On the urging of her
mother she entered the contest, but with little sense of what was awaiting her.
The expatriate American jazz singer from France, surprising everyone (herself
included), took top honors in the jazz world’s most demanding competition. An
illustrious panel of judges – Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dianne Reeves, Kurt
Elling, Patti Austin and Al Jarreau – noted her impeccable vocal technique,
innate musicality, and gifts as an interpreter of popular song. “She brought
down the house,” reported the Washington Post. Yet, as music critic Ann
Midgett observed, “Her marathon is just beginning.”
Since 2010, McLorin Salvant has soared to the top of the music world, garnering
praise and gathering awards. “She has poise, elegance, soul, humor,
sensuality, power, virtuosity, range, insight, intelligence, depth and grace,”
announced Wynton Marsalis. “You get a singer like this once in a generation or
two.” She has been honored with top spots in DownBeat’s critic’s polls
in the categories of “Jazz Album of the Year” and “Top Female Vocalist.”
NPR Music has awarded her “Best Jazz Vocal Album of the Year” and “Best
Jazz Vocalist.” Her debut album, WomanChild (2013), received a GRAMMY®
nomination. And her following releases, For One to Love (2015) and Dreams and
Daggers (2017), both won GRAMMY® Awards for “Best Jazz Vocal Album.”
McLorin Salvant is a singer whose unique style demonstrates a keen sense of the
history of jazz and American music. Among her peers she is unique in the breadth
and depth of her
repertoire. She fearlessly performs songs from jazz’s roots in minstrel shows
and ragtime, like Bert William’s “Nobody” and Jelly Roll Morton’s
“Murder Ballad.” She digs deep into blues queens like Bessie Smith and Ida
Cox, bringing out the mix of jubilation and sorrow that is at the core of the
blues. She sings from both the center and the periphery of the Great American
Songbook, unearthing forgotten songs while offering fresh interpretations of
well-known standards and enlivening Broadway gems with jazzy accents. Beyond the
borders of American music, she also is an expert interpreter of Francophone
chansons and cabaret numbers, tracing the influence of jazz across the globe,
and retracing her own personal path as a musician from America to France and
back again. If that weren’t enough, McLorin Salvant is also a gifted composer
whose moving additions to the repertoire reflect her unique perspective on love,
life, and womanhood.
Her gifts as an artist are rooted in her intensive study of the history of
American Music and her uncanny ability to curate its treasures for her audience.
Her albums are explorations of the immense repository of experience and feeling
that abound in popular song. She understands the special role of the musician to
find and share the emotions and messages in music that speak to our past,
present and future. “I am not interested in the idea of relevance,” she
explains. “I am interested in the idea of presence. I want to communicate
across time, through time, play with time.”
All of McLorin Salvant’s study, training, creativity, intelligence, and
artistry come together in her voice. The sound of her voice, to borrow a phrase,
“contains multitudes.” It covers the gamut from breathy to bold, deep and
husky to high and resonant, limpid to bluesy, with a clarity and richness that
is nearly unparalleled. When she first burst onto the jazz scene, many listeners
were struck by her ability to recall the sound of Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughan,
or Betty Carter. Yet with each new album, McLorin Salvant’s voice has become
more her own, more singular.
While conjuring the spirits of the ancestors, her references are controlled,
focused, and purposeful. Her remarkable vocal technique never overshadows her
rich interpretations of songs both familiar and obscure.
Critics praise McLorin Salvant’s gifts as an interpreter of popular song.
“The marvel of Cécile McLorin Salvant is the complexity of her point of view
as an artist,” writes David Hajdu in the pages of The Nation. “Like most
jazz and cabaret singers, she works in a milieu that is essentially
interpretive…But she chooses her material so astutely, and interprets it so
adroitly, that the songs come across like the personal expression of an
idiosyncratic individual with an utterly contemporary sensibility.” She
inhabits the inner life of a lyric, shading them with subtle, often ironic
poignancies through the use of vocal inflections, improvisations, varied
phrasing, and articulation. Fred Kaplan of the New Yorker praises her
“emotional range” and her ability to “inhabit different personas in the
course of a song, sometimes even a phrase – delivering the lyrics in a
faithful spirit while also commenting on them, mining them for unexpected drama
and wit." In McLorin Salvant’s own words, “I think there is a lot of room
for improvisation and surprise while still singing the lyric, and when that is
successfully done it can express a great deal of emotion and reveal the
different layers in the music and in the text all at once.”
Onstage, her persona is often compared to that of an actress. But, as McLorin
Salvant notes, “jazz would not be what it is without its theatrical origins,
vaudeville, and minstrel shows.” Through her selection of repertory and
brilliant interpretations, she “plays with time,” making the musical past
speak to our contemporary world. Her unflinching performance of songs from the
minstrel tradition, such as Bert William’s “Nobody,” challenge us to
think harder about race in America today. Her ironic, even sinister, rendition
of songs like “Wives and Lovers” explore the complex intertwining of sex,
gender and power. Her blues numbers are bawdy and vibrant, melancholic and
forlorn, insistent and emancipatory. She sings of the ecstasy and agony of love,
of jubilation and dejection, of desire and being desired, of fearlessness and
fragility. “I want to get as close to the center of the song as I can,”
McLorin Salvant explains. “When I find something beautiful and touching
I try to get close to it and share that with the audience.” Immersed in the
song and yet completely in control, McLorin Salvant brings her immense
personality to the music – daring, witty, playful, honest and mischievous.
Each new recording by McLorin Salvant reveals new aspects of her artistry.
WomanChild and For One to Love established her style, her command, and
interpretive range. Dreams and Daggers is a work that highlights her fresh and
fearless approach to art that transcends the conventional – live and in the
studio, with a trio and with a string quartet, standards and original
compositions – held together by a vocal delivery that cuts against the grain,
ever deepening, intensifying and nuancing the lyrics.
Her newest release, The Window, an album of duets with the pianist Sullivan
Fortner, explores and extends the tradition of the piano-vocal duo and its
expressive possibilities. With just Fortner’s deft accompaniment to support
McLorin Salvant, the two are free to improvise and rhapsodize, to play freely
with time, harmony, melody and phrasing.
Thematically, The Window is a meditative cycle of songs about the mercurial
nature of love. The duo explores the theme across a wide repertory that includes
Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim, the inner-visionary Stevie Wonder, gems of
French cabaret, and early Rhythm and Blues, alongside McLorin
Salvant’s brilliant, original compositions. Just as a window frames a
view—revealing as much as it hides, connecting as much as it separates –
each song on the album offers a shifting and discerning perspective on
love’s emotional complexity. McLorin Salvant sings of anticipation and joy,
obsession and madness, torment and longing, tactics and coyness. The Window
traverses love’s wide universe, from the pleasure of a lover’s touch with
its feelings of human communion, to the invisible masks we wear to hide from
others and from ourselves.
Touched at every moment by McLorin Salvant’s brilliance, The Window is a
dazzling new release from an artist who is surely, to quote Duke Ellington,
“beyond category.”