Award is a nod to her bright future
CecileMcLorin Salvant sees MacArthur ‘genius grant’ as a push to ‘step it up’ in her career
When jazz singer Cecile McLorin Salvant recently learned that shewon a MacArthur Fellowship— which awards recipients $125,000 annually for five years— her responsewas as forthright as her music.
“When they called me, I told them: You made a mistake,” she says of the coveted prize announced Tuesday.
“Because it’sme. I know people who havewon this. I’m fans of people who havewon this. I idolize people who havewon this.”
Indeed, some of the most innovative and revered figures in jazz have receivedMacArthur “genius grants,” as they’re popularly known, meaning they hold an exclusive place in a distinctly American music. Any award that has honored drummer Max Roach (1988), pianist Cecil Taylor (1991), multiinstrumentalist Anthony Braxton (1994), composerinstrumentalist George Lewis (2002) and pianists Reginald Robinson (2004), JasonMoran (2010) and Vijay Iyer (2013), among others, clearly aims for the pinnacle of jazz creativity.
So notwithstanding Salvant’s three Grammy Awards and recent Doris Duke Artist Award (a $275,000 grant), she sees theMacArthur as saying more about her future than her past.
“I feel like this comes at a time when I’m rather young,” says Salvant, 31. “I think it’s also like a push: Nowyouhave to step it up. To me, it’s almost an acknowledgment ofmy potential more than anything else. I don’t see this as a celebration of a career. I see this as a confirmation: You have potential, we see something in you.”
Therein lies the power of theMacArthurs when it comes to jazz. For a music long marginalized in our popular culture has precious few awards that can galvanize a career and, therefore, enrich the art form at large. JazzGrammy winners, for instance, don’t get to accept their trophies on the global TV broadcast and therefore can’t benefit frombeing introduced to millions of viewers. Pulitzer Prizes in music only rarely have gone to jazz composers (Wynton Marsalis in 1997, Ornette Coleman in 2007 and Henry Threadgill in 2016).
By lavishing financial support, drawing media attention and bringing immeasurable stature to musicians such asMoran, Iyer and nowSalvant early in their careers, theMacArthur Fellowships not only bolster careers but create new centers of gravity in jazz. A year afterMoran won, for instance, hewas named theKennedy Center’s artistic adviser for jazz andwas appointed artistic director for jazz in 2014, elevating the music’s stature in the nation’s capital. A year after Iyer received his MacArthur, he joined the HarvardUniversity faculty as the FranklinD. and Florence Rosenblatt professor of the arts in the music department.
Though Salvant understandably prefers to look ahead to what she’s going to create, rather than what she already has, her contributions richly merit the MacArthur. As a jazz vocalist, she stands apart from peers thanks to the breadth of her imagination and the acuity of her technique. When Salvant takes on a jazz standard, the listener has no idea what she’ll do fromone measure to the next.
Leading a quartet at SPACE in Evanston in 2012, Salvant “crystallized the history of female jazz vocals, embracing a vast range of influences but transforming them, as well,” I wrote inmy review. “Somehow, Salvant managed to incorporate el
ements ofwork by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter, Carmen McRae, ShirleyHorn and Dee Dee Bridgewater, among others, without becoming subsumed by them. … In away, Salvant at this early stage of her career presents not one vocal profile but several— often within the course of a single song. Her ample technique allows her to change colors, textures and attacks from one phrase to the next. And her musical intelligence enables her to find newways of reading very familiar lyrics.”
This extremely elastic way of interpreting songs may owe, in part, to Salvant’swide-ranging musical background. Born in Miami to a French mother andHaitian father, she studied classical piano at 5, began classical voice lessons in her teens and was immersed in other genres, aswell.
“Iwas brought up, thankfully, in a house wherewe listened to different kinds of music, and jazz was one of them,” says Salvant, who’s based in Brooklyn. “Bluegrass, classical, all kinds of vocal
music, fado, Senegalese music, Cape Verdean music, American popular music of all kinds.”
Among them all, jazz held special allure as Salvant came of age, for a variety of reasons.
“Its playfulness, its political aspects,” says the singer. “The fact that it is one of the underdogs in all music genres, the fact that it is a music that is totally misunderstood, disdained, representing such a small part of the (music) industry.
“As I got deeper into it, what I really lovedwas therewas the mixture between folk music and approaches of classical music. Itwas like a multiracial music with all these different kinds of influences mixing together. With all these different ideologies. Some people say ‘this is jazz’ and ‘this is not.’ There’s something so dynamic and exciting about this.”
Yet Salvant’s artistic perspectives stretch far outside jazz. Her cantata “Ogresse” (2018) is an original “musical fairy tale or fable,” she says, in which she’s the storyteller and plays all the characters. It
features an orchestral score “that blends baroque elements with bluegrass and jazz,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.
Salvant also refers to it as “a little like a murder ballad” and has beenworking to develop the piece into an animated film.
Yes, Salvant creates animation, some of which is viewable on herwebsite (www.cecilemclorinsalvant .com) under the banner of a project she calls Yolk. It’s a “cross-disciplinary performance space that I created, and that I’ve been envisioning for years,” says Salvant.
Doesn’t she risk spreading herself a bit thin with all these ventures?
“There’s a new eclecticism that I think exists today, thanks in part to the internet,” says Salvant, in explaining her wide-open view of the arts. “I look at people younger than me and see howthey are interested in such a vast amount of things, fromall kinds of different eras.
“But you also can get lost in it. To me, Yolk is an opportunity or a method to curate something. … I love singing, but there’s something really electrifying to me in going: Let’s put this with this, and rub this with this, and see howthat sounds.”
As for the racial reckoning happening in America now, Salvant takes a nuanced view.
“I’m responding to it with amixture of awe, fear, impatience,” she says. “None of this is new. None of the things that are happening have just started happening. They’re just nowgetting blown up by social media.”
Racial justice, adds Salvant, “is a super long process. And the nature of social media, the nature of the news cycle, is things are trending, and then they stop trending.
“Fromthe get-go, I’ve been thinking about: How canwe keep this going? Howcanwe keep this reckoning going?
“Howcanwe remind people of the summer of 2020?”
Salvant nowis uniquely positioned to do so.