Cecile McLorin Salvant

Cécile McLorin Salvant – Mélusine (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 45:15 minutes | 991 MB | Genre: Vocal Jazz, Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch

The album features a mix of five originals and interpretations of nine songs, dating as far back as the twelfth century, mostly sung in French along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl. The album includes the single ‘D’un feu secret’, Michel Lambert’s 1660 air de cour, with an animated video by Amanda Bonaiuto.

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Cecile McLorin Salvant – WomanChild (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:00 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mack Avenue Records

WomanChild is the 2013 release by award-winning jazz vocalist, Cecile McLorin Salvant. The recording finds Cecile interpreting songs spanning three centuries of American music. Joining Cecile are pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Rodney Whitaker, guitarist James Chirillo and drummer Herlin Riley. The album gives music lovers the opportunity to hear her captivating vocals which earned her top honors at the Monk Competition.

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Cécile McLorin Salvant – The Window (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:21 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mack Avenue Records

After bursting onto the scene in 2013 with the brilliant WomanChild, Cécile McLorin Salvant raised the bar two years later with For One To Love, an even more impressive and complete album on which her voice worked wonders, and the more traditional Dreams & Daggers, recorded live at the Village Vanguard and the DiMenna Center with her faithful trio, the Quatuor Catalyst and the pianist Sullivan Fortner. She chose only to work with the latter of the two for her 2018 vintage album titled The Window.

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Cécile McLorin Salvant – For One to Love (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:02 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mack Avenue

Announcing herself with 2013’s sumptuous WomanChild, Cécile McLorin Salvant takes her sound still further on her new record, For One to Love, released on the Mack Avenue label. The album is masterful, a more complete offering on every level, in which the songstress permits her voice to work sonic miracles. Besides being a jazz singer of the highest calibre, McLorin Salvant was born on August 28th 1989 in Miami, Florida, studied French Law, while dabbling in baroque and jazz vocals in Aix-en-Provence, before going on to win the Thelonious Monk contest in 2010 (at just 20 years of age, before a jury composed of Al Jarreau, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Patti Austin, Dianne Reeves, and Kurt Elling!). As if all this wasn’t enough, the young artist is also an impressive composer, evidenced by the five original songs within this 2015 vintage. For One to Love takes in a variety of covers, too, including an incendiary version of ‘Wives and Lovers’, an old Burt Bacharach composition, alongside Blanche Calloway’s ‘Growlin’ Dan’ (Calloway was, of course, the first woman to lead a band of men!), and ‘What’s The Matter Now’, a track initially popularized by Bessie Smith. Another highlight on the disc comes in the form of a stunning reinterpretation of ‘Mal de vivre’ by Barbara. In sum, For One to Love proves to be a beautiful room for the voice of the young Franco-American, Harlem-based singer to play out in. It is a great moment for vocal jazz; the treble quivers, the bass stirs the soul. The greatness is aided through the music served up by the four backing musicians: pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Paul Sikivie, drummer Lawrence Leathers, and accordionist Vincent Peirani. A momentous record.

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Cécile McLorin Salvant – Dreams and Daggers (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:52:15 minutes | 2,15 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mack Avenue Records

One album after another, Cecile McLorin Salvant reminds us she’s anything but the stereotypical “jazz singer”. Revealed to the public in 2013 with her gorgeousWomanChild, she stepped it up a gear two years later with For One To Love, an even more masterful and complete record, on which her voice worked wonders. Born on August 28th, 1989 in Miami, Florida, she studied French law, baroque and vocal jazz in Aix-en-Provence before winning the Thelonious Monk International Competition in 2010 (at only 20, in front of a jury composed of Al Jarreau, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Patti Austin, Dianne Reeves and Kurt Elling!). She went on to display impressive qualities as a composer as well with five original songs on her 2015 album. With Dreams And Dagger the French-American, who now lives in Harlem, is releasing a third album recorded live at Village Vanguard, the New York Mecca of jazz, and at the DiMenna Center, supported by her faithful trio (pianist Aaron Diehl, bass player Paul Sikivie and drummer Lawrence Leathers) and some guests on a few tracks, such as Quatuor Catalyst and pianist Sullivan Fortner. A real choice for the artist, who wishes she could only record live albums, the context in which her band’s sound is most faithfully presented. More classic in its form than her two previous works, Dreams And Dagger is proof of her fluency no matter the repertoire. For a classic like My Man’s Gone Now, for which thousands of versions already exist, she embarks with her voice on unique paths, to astounding effect! Furthermore, Cecile McLorin Salvant fully bonds with her trio, which isn’t just a simple stooge for her amazing voice, but an essential part of her musical world. Once again, she blazes an even deeper trail, far from the Billie/Sarah/Ella Holy Trinity, because as Wynton Marsalis put it: “You only get a singer like this once in a generation or two…”.

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Cécile McLorin Salvant – Ghost Song (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 46:06 minutes | 934 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch

Just to show that there will be a Ghost Song before and after, Cécile McLorin Salvant opens her album with a rather unexpected cover of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights that she starts totally a cappella. Of course, the Franco-American has never followed the tradition of jazz singers to the letter – or what is expected of them – but here she drives the nail a little deeper both in her diction, still as original and fascinating, as in the – eclectic – instrumentation she has chosen. And then she herself admits that she was really interested, for the very first time, in the production of her recording. To a sound quest and not just to offer a simple photo of her and her band, as in the past. Here, the 2010 winner of the Thelonious Monk International Competition dares everything. The nonchalant ballad, carried by the virtuoso piano of his brilliant accomplice Sullivan Fortner (Moon Song), like the vibrant sean-nós, this highly ornamented style of traditional Irish singing (Unquiet Grave), or the cover at the same time jumping and grandiloquent of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (The World is Mean). Ghost Song offers a kind of extraterrestrial gospel before landing on a more muted pitch or a theatrical declamation and so on … One can easily be confused by this leapfrog-like eclecticism with sounds and decades, continents and moods. “I made an album like I make a playlist, able to string a twelfth-century music to a Kendrick Lamar track…”. It is in this never gratuitous, never vain originality that Cécile McLorin Salvant cuts the bridges with a certain tradition of vocal jazz. Tradition that it never rejects, on the contrary, but that it destabilizes as if by Obligation. As if to better appropriate it and prevent it from drowning in the formalin of museification. One thing is for sure: jazz is alive on Ghost Song!
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