This month: Cécile Mclorin Salvant
Cécile Mclorin Salvant sings, composes, creates visual art and can generally be relied upon to do the unexpected. She has a new album (her first for Nonesuch) due early next year: ‘It’s unlike anything I’ve done before – it’s getting closer to reflecting my personality as someone who is, shall we say, an eclectic curator. I’m embracing my weirdness! There are a few bands on it, some unexpected special guests who aren’t musicians and there’s a lot of original music.’
She is already thinking of taking a new approach for her EFG London Jazz Festival performance at London’s Cadogan Hall on 16 November: ‘I normally just perform what I want at gigs, but I’m actually going to tour the material on this album, so for now I’m choosing songs for my set that are linked to that material in some way or that have some sort of association with it for me.’ This kind of lateral thinking is something that informs all her work, particularly her interest in the narrative aspect of singing. ‘I think I always wanted to be an actress!’ she explains. ‘I never really engaged with the theatre professionally but I always loved it. I also wanted to be an opera singer for a long time. Some of my favourite singers are the ones who make songs clear. My favourite readers, too – I’m a big audiobook listener and I also love hearing poetry and watching lectures. What I appreciate is clarity, so you understand what the words are. That’s what I try to do when I’m performing.’
Her musical education began in her native Miami and continued in France. ‘That’s where I started singing,’ she says, ‘but singing songs that were in English for audiences that didn’t really speak English well, so I think that’s when I began to develop this need to be understood. When you’re bilingual you quickly realise that you can’t just rattle off words to people who have varying degrees of fluency in whatever language; you have to give a bit more consideration to your diction and to the vocabulary you choose. That’s probably something else I’ve carried with me this whole time.’ Roger Thomas
‘When you’re bilingual you quickly realise that you can’t just rattle off words’