Cécile McLorin Salvant: Further Still
By going deeper into her own life and art, the best jazz singer of her generation is creating a bold new archetype, free from genre. by Martin Johnson
There haven’t been banner headlines or contentious social-media threads about it, but we’re living through a golden age for jazz singing. There are devoted, often-brilliant classicists like Samara Joy, Catherine Russell and Mark Winkler. There are newcomers and veterans alike experimenting with soulful rhythms, among them Jazzmeia Horn, Kurt Elling and Veronica Swift. There are groups like Duchess, the Royal Bopsters and the Baylor Project, each with an agenda to push styles forward. And there are lone-wolf improvisers tackling tradition on their own terms, like Theo Bleckmann, Sara Serpa, Taylor McFerrin and Georgia Anne Muldrow. Yet none of this widespread activity — what an academic journal might call ferment in the field — casts a net wide enough to encapsulate the work of Cécile McLorin Salvant. She goes further.
In the 12 years since Salvant made a booming entrance on the jazz scene by winning, at age 21, the 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition, she has diligently redefined the popular concept of a jazz singer. Rather than being a vehicle for the unchallenged romantic visions of the Great American Songbook (think Diana Krall, Jane Monheit and, well, Lady Gaga), Salvant has offered numerous other identity tropes. She’s the cultural-studies professor examining, even interrogating, the racism and sexism in the lyrics of well-known songs. She’s the crate-digger finding nuggets from forgotten musicals and films, as well as obscure songs by great songwriters and singers. And she’s a storyteller, bringing with her an actress’ arsenal of nuanced theatricality, wit and intelligence.
Her appearance leaves the hackneyed glamour of jazz and traditional-pop singing in the dust. Her hair is short. She typically wears large-framed glasses that would do any self-respecting nerd proud, and her clothing choices are heavily informed by the designer Issey Miyake and his Pleats Please line, which presents women as fashionable doers rather than needy ingenues. “His clothes are timeless, comfortable and perfect to travel with,” she wrote to me in an email. “They are easy and at the same time very elegant. They check all the boxes in terms of what I like to wear on stage.”
Her accomplishments extend beyond her six albums as a leader or co-leader, several noteworthy collaborations and three Grammy Awards. In 2020 she was named a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of the “genius grant.” By that time she’d created Ogresse, an evening-length collaboration with the composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue, and is currently co-directing an animated feature based on the piece. In the early days of the pandemic, she helped catalyze the trend toward livestreamed performances from artists’ homes when she and the pianist Sullivan Fortner presented a Facebook/Instagram Live concert that attracted over 150,000 views.
Fortner has been a key collaborator, a musician who can deftly fortify her commentary. On their 2018 release, The Window, they tackle “Somewhere,” the evergreen about yearning for upward mobility. But before Salvant can begin to weigh in with the lyric, Fortner interpolates “America,” also from West Side Story. The results seem to torpedo the universality of “Somewhere,” turning it instead toward an inquiry into the post-millennial validity of the American Dream. Salvant’s mission is less to bring the classics into contemporary times than it is to take our contemporary times to the classics.
Salvant and Fortner demonstrate the sort of telepathic communication typical of the finest duos in jazz, but they rarely rehearse. He recently told the New York Times that, instead, the duo visit museums. Salvant is also a visual artist, but Fortner says that her awareness of all phases of culture inform their approach.
That’s what makes Ghost Song, her new recording and debut for Nonesuch, so daring. She probably could have rested on her laurels for a decade or more, touring behind her revisions of standards and putting out recordings on Mack Avenue, a jazz stalwart and her previous label. On Nonesuch, her labelmates range more broadly, from singer-songwriters to contemporary-classical composers, and though she denies that the brand has impacted her aesthetic, it’s impossible not to hear a different Cécile on the record’s opening track, a searing cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.”
Salvant begins her performance a cappella, bringing full operatic splendor to the longing verses, so that when the minimalist backing kicks in and she sings, straightforwardly, “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy/I’ve come home, I’m so cold,” the vulnerability and ache strike like a power chord; the lone bassline that ends the a capella segment acts as loud punctuation. Like countless others she was introduced to Bush’s music as a teenager, and, as she wrote to me, “became completely obsessed” with it. In many ways, Ghost Song is a more personal recording than its predecessors. She does more of her own songs than covers, and those songs deal with loss and love more often than with social comment.
The other 11 tracks contain similar juxtapositions of elegance and force. The title track starts with Salvant referencing the might of field hollers and finishes with the gentle croons of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. “Trail Mix” is a solo piece that features Salvant on piano, and on “Dead Poplar,” she sings a letter written from the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The album closes with “Unquiet Grave,” on which she sings a cappella again, bringing the program to a symmetrical finish.
Salvant, who is of Haitian and French parentage, did not grow up with ambitions to be a musician. It was something she did — mostly classical singing — while she studied law. In that context, it’s easy to read her new recording less as a departure than as the beginning of a return. She’s starting to express the full breadth of her interests rather than just recasting what a jazz singer can be.
In that regard, she is likely to have followers. Many young musicians sing, but far fewer idolize the showbiz culture that surrounded the iconic jazz singers of the 20th century. The reality of young adulthood today is grittier and more vividly complex, with more opportunities for cultural and historical learning than ever, and Salvant’s music reflects both the messiness and the transcendence of this moment. Singers are at a peak and Salvant is a leader, with a battalion of talented performers behind her.
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