Cécile McLorin Salvant is a fearless vocalist, composer, and visual artist who has quickly become one of jazz’s most respected voices. The multiple Grammy winner and MacArthur Fellow showcases her passion for storytelling and peerless artistic vision in a Perspectives series that continues this spring at Carnegie Hall.
One of the hallmarks of your career has been variety. How would you describe your musical style?
Cécile McLorin Salvant: I typically see what I do musically as simply singing songs. It’s been freeing for me to step outside of thinking about things as being part of this genre or that genre. I used to do that when I was in school. I was studying jazz voice and classical voice and Baroque voice, and I would put things in their boxes and say, “You have to do this in this style, and this is authentic for this.” I’ve realized that they’re all actually just songs, and they’re all stories and characters that I get to portray. And so it’s more about how compelling the song is to me. When I think about different mediums and different disciplines of art—performing arts, visual arts—I try to stop constantly categorizing everything. I just don’t think it’s helpful in the creative process. With this series of concerts, I’m looking to show the breadth of my artistry. But it’s not just about showcasing me and my personal vision. I also want to highlight the different collaborators I have had the joy and luck to be able to work with over the years.
Your series began last November with a quartet performance that included pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole, followed by a duo concert with Fortner. How did you approach these events?
With the quartet, we have an established repertoire that we’ve amassed over the last decade. We typically don’t use a set list—sometimes we choose songs based on the feeling in the room, the vibe of the audience. But I would say that a quartet performance involves a lot of communication in the moment, a lot of improvisation, a lot of surprises. And in my duo concerts with Sullivan, we’re even looser than we are in the quartet. We have maybe 300 songs that we’ve played together. Sometimes we learn a song backstage and then go out and do it. Sometimes we do a new song spur of the moment that we’ve never played because someone in the audience requests it. So it can really get a little crazy. With him, I can dip my toe a little bit more into the cabaret sphere, the musical theater sphere, which I think is adjacent to what we call jazz.
On March 27, you join forces with The Knights for a completely different type of concert.
I’ll be singing ballads in symphonic arrangements by Darcy James Argue—mostly standards from the Great American Songbook with some Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Kurt Weill. For a very long time, I’ve wanted to sing these classics in this very lush musical environment—and to have Darcy’s unique take on all of that will be really interesting. I’ve never worked with an orchestra that actually felt like a band until I first performed with The Knights. Sometimes you play with these large orchestras and it can feel a bit intimidating, but The Knights have always been so warm and welcoming. And they’re also really adventurous—they want to try anything and everything. It’s such a rare treat for a singer, since you can’t really tour with a large ensemble. Because the songs have to be arranged for the orchestra, it’s overall a big production. But it’s a privilege to be able to do it at all.
How does working with an orchestra like The Knights differ from your smaller quartet or duo collaborations?
I would say working with an orchestra is inherently something that’s a lot more planned and organized. We want the same looseness and adventurous quality that we have with the smaller bands, but ultimately that’s going to be baked into the arrangements by Darcy. He is just such an interesting mind in music, and his writing is extremely adventurous and takes many left turns.
Your Perspectives concludes with Ogresse this May. What should audiences know about that work beforehand?
Ogresse is an 80-minute piece with orchestra and animated projections of landscapes of different scenes. It’s a murder ballad/musical fable, opera, storytelling-around-the-campfire moment. I sing the role of the narrator and embody all these different characters. It’s about a woman who lives in the forest. It’s a love story and it’s funny and it’s tragic and it’s a little bit magical. I wrote it on my piano, underneath a painting I have of a giant woman in the woods. I think she was one of my main inspirations, but there’s also the story of Sarah Baartman, who was a South African woman taken to Europe and exhibited in the freak shows because of her body. After her death, her remains were on display in a museum for decades. It’s gruesome what happened to her—very fetishistic, a disgusting way to treat a human being. And so in a way, this is a little bit of her revenge, but it’s also an original story that draws on mythology and different fairy tales from my childhood. It has elements of my own life, of the lives of the people who are close to me and things I’ve observed. Nature has a big role in the story. The forest has a big role. And I am now making it into an animated feature-length film. It’s a project that’s really, really important to me.
Since you debuted the piece in 2018, how has it changed?
The piece itself has remained relatively the same since I wrote it six or seven years ago. But my interpretation of it has changed. I’ve gotten more and more into the theatrical, dramatic aspect of it. In performance, I wear a huge gold-brown silk dress that my mother made for me. On the back of it are embroidered flowers and snakes. As time goes by, I embroider another flower, another snake. So now there are several of each.
What has it been like for you to showcase your varied musical interests—particularly at a venue like Carnegie Hall that is steeped in tradition?
When I’m performing, I’m not thinking about it being Carnegie Hall—if I did, I’d be paralyzed. It’s more when I go in as an audience member that I see how grand the space is. You’re walking in through the entrance, you’re in the audience, you see the Hall. But as a performer, I keep my blinders on and try to stay focused on the performance. I remember I did a benefit concert at the Hall a while ago and there were some younger musicians who were freaking out backstage, wanting everything to be perfect. And while you would like for everything to go well, I think it’s kind of a recipe for disaster to be thinking about that too much. It’s a really special place, but I won’t be thinking about that while I’m singing—I’ll wait to reflect on that after I walk off stage.
