MULTIFACETED MUSICIAN A GIFT OF GENERATIONS
Salvant channels the greats through her own style
The future of jazz song is bright and her name is Cécile Mclorin Salvant.
Much more than a jazz singer, this Miami native long transplanted to New York is wise to a world of musical genres and styles. Her lengthy moniker clues to the fact you can't sum up such a multifaceted artist in any single slot though jazz is the medium she uses to put it out there.
“I use the word jazz almost as a translation of a tradition I'm associated with,” offers Salvant, adding that everyone from Barbra Streisand to The Spice Girls has played some part in her development. “I am so honoured to be associated with a genre that has had such incredible artists within it but a lot of these jazz greats rejected the term or thought they did much more than jazz. The concept is fascinating because it's sticky, huge and accommodates almost everything, but it's also disdained by audiences and musicians alike. It's something some people take great pride in and for others it's like the plague.”
It says much that three of Salvant's six releases have won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album. At 32, she's also one of the youngest artists to win the Macarthur Fellowship “genius grant,” kind of a Pulitzer Prize for jazz.
Salvant has an uncanny ability to channel the greats with the quasi-operatic power of Sarah Vaughan, the girlish fun of Ella Fitzgerald, the conversational mellow of Betty Carter. No mere copyist, she synthesizes all that and her own experience of blues, folk, pop, music theatre and classical with striking technical finesse in songs that genuinely surprise. It feels as if she can do it all, fearlessly, effortlessly.
You might find her seeking out songs that allow her to take “a left turn.”
“I want a song that establishes something and then just goes left,” says Salvant, “something that has a hinge to it, and suddenly you're on a different path. Sometimes they even go left harmonically or rhythmically so you're just shocked. I love being surprised.”
Check her recent album Ghost Song, an eclectic new career step with her new label Nonesuch Records. Next to refreshing covers of Kate Bush, Sting, Kurt Weill and a closing a cappella traditional it sports seven intriguing original numbers that cover the map, harnessing everything from synthesizer to pipe organ along with more conventional jazz support players.
Salvant characterizes her own writing as “intuitive sculpting of raw matter” though she's not averse to flirting with specific structures for a song, a concert or an album. Her themes draw from personal experience, like I Lost My Mind on Ghost Song, a response to the pandemic.
“Some of these songs are characters but they're rooted in characters I know. It's in the air around me as I'm writing. Or a song like I Lost My Mind, we all have that bubbling underneath. Singing that as a character or myself, it feels really good to grab a pillow and scream into it.”
Growing up in Miami, daughter of a Haitian doctor father and a French teacher mother, Salvant heard everything around the house and lists Cesaria Evora, Seu Jorge, Mariza and Dianne Reeves as significant early concert memories. After taking piano from five and joining a choir at eight, she moved to France to study both classical voice and improvisation in her teens, picking up a university degree in French law along the way.
Salvant's Paris-recorded debut disc was released in 2010 just after she won the Thelonious Monk Competition. Subsequent touring with the Jazz At Lincoln Centre Orchestra found Wynton Marsalis telling The New Yorker, “You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.”
All this helped shape the organic path that led her to Ghost Song but it's anyone's guess where she goes from here. Among other projects, Salvant is learning to play the lute and trying to find funding to complete her 80-minute animated film The Ogresse, with an all-original song cycle. Then there's her side career as a visual artist who paints on textiles, images she exhibits and uses on her album graphics.
She calls the band she's bringing to Edmonton's jazz fest “new-ish” but it retains longtime pianist Sullivan Fortner who shared her duo concert here in 2019 along with guitarist Marvin Sewell, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and percussionist Keita Ogawa.
“I love playing with them,” says Salvant.
Acclaimed Icelandic pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs and her quartet open the show.
OTHER CONCERT EVENTS
He avoids flashy stuff but guitar star Julian Lage (rhymes with raj) finds an uncommon depth, gorgeous, sprightly energy and intuitive interplay with bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, the trio he brings to Macewan's Triffo Theatre on Monday. Due out on their second Blue Note release this fall, 34-year-old California-based Lage is a master in the making.
And it's a welcome reunion of friends when Cuban pianist-composer Hilario Duran leads the Edmonton Jazz Orchestra in kicking off the festival at the Winspear on Sunday night.
Expect a mix of lush harmonies, flowing textures and romantic themes from this effortless player and the big band.