Cécile McLorin Salvant, is a composer, singer, and visual artist. The late Jessye Norman described Salvant as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings”.
Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, baroque and folkloric music. Salvant is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor.
Salvant won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010. She has received three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for “The Window”, “Dreams and Daggers”, and “For One To Love”, and was nominated for the award in 2014 for her album “WomanChild”.
In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released “Ghost Song” in March 2022, and has since gone onto receive two Grammy Nominations as well as appearing on a number of year end best lists for 2022. On March 24th, 2023 Nonesuch Records released the highly anticipated follow up – “Mélusine”, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida, of a French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at 5, sang in a children’s choir at 8, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager.
Salvant received a bachelor’s in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble while also studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Salvant’s latest work, Ogresse, is a musical fable in the form of a cantata that blends genres (folk, baroque, jazz, country). Salvant wrote the story, lyrics, and music. It is arranged by Darcy James Argue for a thirteen-piece orchestra of multi-instrumentalists. Ogresse, both a biomythography and an homage to the Erzulie (as painted by Gerard Fortune) and Sara Baartman, explores fetishism, hunger, diaspora, cycles of appropriation, lies, othering, and ecology. It is in development to become an animated feature-length film, which Salvant will direct.
Salvant makes large-scale textile drawings. Her visual art can now be found at Picture Room in Brooklyn, NY.
Quotes
“Some 10 years after releasing her debut, Salvant has united the global tributaries and theatrical roots of jazz into a sensuous single voice. At this gig, the repertoire ranged from Kate Bush to Bertolt Brecht and the range of inspirations was just as wide. Yet she put her stamp on all, swooping through the entire vocal range and expanding single words from a whisper to a shout.” —Financial Times
“With three Grammys and a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award to her name, Salvant has already far transcended her early status as her generation’s most imaginative and thrilling jazz interpreter.” —Spin
“The most interesting singer around today—no matter what the genre, no matter what the language.” —Paste
“The singer wants us to trust her as she takes us on a journey to places many of us have never heard of. This is Cécile McLorin Salvant. How can one not go on the adventure? She’s established herself as a nonpareil performer whose range and unique approach to her material, including show tunes and the Great American Songbook, places her in the vanguard of vocal stylists. But even with all of her well-earned accolades, Salvant has outdone herself with the outstanding Mélusine.” —NYC Jazz Record
“Salvant’s gift for transforming shadowy archetypes into extraordinary music sets her in a rarified realm” —Mercury News
“Cécile McLorin Salvant possesses not only one of the most original imaginations in modern jazz, but also succeeds in reaching emotional depths that few other vocalists reach.” —Jazzwise
“Jazz-informed artistry of the highest class.” —Guardian
“Cécile McLorin Salvant plays with musical conventions. Jazz, blues, folk, vaudeville combine to create a unique, captivating, one-of-a-kind story that knows no genre boundaries. It is simply a wonderful, outstanding musical work.” —Jazz Forum
“An exciting puzzle [of languages], thrilling instrumentation, and thrilling interpretion, Mélusine offers it all from Cécile McLorin Salvant. Wonderful, in every sense.” —Jazz News
“Mélusine surprises with its sounds and its creative energy. Salvant always seems to be on the avant side of avant-garde, but that just makes her one of the 21st-century’s most imaginative musicians.” —Spectrum Culture
“Apart from McLorin’s Salvant’s singular voice and compelling musical arrangements, it’s her courage and imagination for such heady projects that set her apart from any contemporary singer, even when she is well beyond the usual fare associated with “jazz vocalists,” a term which severely understates her immense genre-bending talents.” —Glide Magazine
