Cécile McLorin Salvant makes classic songs her own
CAMBRIDGE — “In the words of my sister, I am truly a lucky brat,” said Cécile McLorin Salvant, pausing eight songs into her Celebrity Series of Boston set at Sanders Theatre on Friday to praise her backing trio: pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Savannah Harris.
Indeed, the singer had already stood aside and let them shine on instrumental breaks, Nakamura with a solo on “I Believe in You,” and an even more scintillating one to come later on “One Step Ahead”; Harris on the song they’d just finished, a cover of Sting’s “Until” from Salvant’s 2022 album “Ghost Song.”
Fortner was prominent on everything, but especially “Until” and the previous piece, “Il m’a vue nue,” the lone tune performed Friday from the 2023 Grammy-nominated album “Mélusine.” He began the latter whistling the melody and clapping his hands, and when it was done Salvant jokingly described the classic French tune as about “skinny dipping gone wrong.”
And yet Salvant, 34, with her three previously won Grammys heading into Sunday, was clearly the focal point. She opened with “Stepsisters’ Lament,” from “Cinderella” and her own first Grammy-winning album, “For One to Love.” Then came what proved to be three Burt Bacharach/Hal David tunes back-to-back-to-back: “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” “Alfie,” and “Wives and Lovers.”
Salvant is a genius at inhabiting and bringing fresh perspective to songs, and this was especially so with “Alfie.” In this election year, lines like “Are we meant to take more than we give/Or are we meant to be kind?” seemed to apply as much to politics as romance.
Her ironic spin on “Wives and Lovers,” with its sexist warning that wives must remember to be accommodating, was followed by “Barbara Song” from “The Threepenny Opera,” in which the singer strategically keeps herself coolly “perpendicular” in hopes of securing a fine, rich man until falling for one who is neither and she can’t.
For all her brilliance and self-possession onstage, Salvant told the audience that she is “extremely shy,” describing how she once fled a party in France and awaited the friend she had arrived with by reading a book in their car. She said she sometimes gives herself “little pep talks in the bathroom,” a la the character singing “I Believe in You.”
Later came a medley of two Salvant originals, “Fog” and “Left Over,” both from “For One to Love,” followed by Cole Porter’s “Ridin’ High.” Salvant then fielded audience suggestions for a final song, rejecting “Summertime” because summer was too distant before landing on “One Step Ahead,” a lesser-known song recorded by Aretha Franklin that Salvant covered on her Grammy-winning “The Window.”
As an encore came a medley of two Kate Bush songs: “Wuthering Heights,” from “Ghost Song,” began a cappella, Salvant eschewing the microphone, and “Breathing” ended a cappella as well, Salvant slowly repeating the words
“out, in” several times in what may have been intended as advice for weathering this time of war and strife.