In the twelve years since winning top honors at the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2010, Cécile McLorin Salvant has gone from strength to strength having been described as a voice that comes along “once in a generation”. As an artist, she has certainly demonstrated that she can transcend the quality of her instrument. She’s been recognized as a musical polymath combining her training in classical and baroque performance with a love of musical theater and a penchant for curation that resurrects forgotten pieces by Bert Williams and Valaida Snow (You Bring Out the Savage in Me!) and putting a personal touch to everything from The Trolley Song to Wives and Lovers to I Didn’t Know What Time It Was. The accolades have come fast and furious including three Grammy Awards, a MacArthur Genius Grant, a Doris Duke Artist Grant and this year’s Jazz Journalist Association award for Female Vocalist of the Year. (Did I mention that she’s also a talented visual artist who recently hosted her own gallery show in New York? See her website for some beautiful examples!)
In my opinion, her best work remains unrecorded – Ogresse is a mini-opera entirely composed by her, orchestrated by Darcy James Argue and fully performed a scant three times – a West Coast Tour was canceled by covid on the date of its scheduled first performance (and quickly turned into a private show for Angela Davis!) I was fortunate enough to catch a pre-covid performance of Ogresse in New York at Rose Hall and wrote about it here. Ogresse is a Brothers Grimm-style fable that tells of a ravenous creature who eats her adversaries but whose loneliness makes her vulnerable to a duplicitous bounty hunter – definitely a turn to the dark side.
McLorin Salvant’s first recording released since Ogresse is Ghost Song – her debut recording for the prestigious Nonesuch label. It’s filled with even darker themes of haunting, loss and yearning in a typically eclectic mix of covers and original compositions – as McLorin Salvant has commented: “I’m embracing my weirdness!”
Coincidentally, I was back in New York for the premier performance of McLorin Salvant’s Ghost Song tour on May 12 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall backed by her long time collaborator Sullivan Fortner on piano, Alexa Tarantino on flute, Marvin Sewell on guitar, Yasushi Nakamura on bass and Keita Ogawa on drums and percussion. McLorin Salvant cut a striking figure with a loose shimmering purplish dress and a large red Elizabethan collar and was clearly happy to be back in front of an audience on familiar turf. On entering, she immediately captured the room with a gripping a cappella rendition of the old English ballad The Unquiet Grave about a young man pining for his deceased lover which closes the new recording.
Over the next ninety minutes, she and the band showcased the Ghost Song album with only occasional forays off the recorded song list mostly for “companion” compositions. Harold Arlen’s Optimistic Voices serenades Dorothy and her companions as they approach the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz but McLorin Salvant turns it to the dark side in an inspired medley with Gregory Porter’s No Love Dying. In concert, they were preceded by the most yearning of all show tunes – Somewhere Over The Rainbow complete with the rarely performed verse. The ThreePenny Opera is the source for Kurt Weill’s lament The World Is Mean. In concert, it was accompanied by – as McLorin Salvant introduced it – “a song about revenge!”: Weill’s Pirate Jenny (alternately known as The Black Freighter) in which the maid Jenny fantasizes about being rescued from a life of drudgery by a pirate ship that slaughters her oppressors at her command.
A quote from her grandmother that “expectations are premeditated resentments” was the inspiration for her original song Obligation – “what happens when the foundation of a relationship is guilt – not love?”. A passage from Colette’s La Seconde led to the song of dreams and love shrouded in Thunderclouds. Most of the songs from the recording made an appearance along with other covers including Sting’s Until, Dianne Reeves’ Mista and, for the first encore, Bessie Smith’s gutbucket blues St. Louis Gal.
McLorin Salvant was justifiably proud of her band and gave them many opportunities to shine – she made a point of noting that Alexa Tarantino had been part of L’Orchestre Ogresse in her previous appearance on the Rose Hall stage. In particular, Sewell made his guitar sound like a ukulele chorus for Optimistic Voices and Tarantino recreated her expressive flute solo on No Love Dying from the recording.
McLorin Salvant’s own title composition Ghost Song is the sole holdover from her previous repertoire – the only song she performed both nights in her 2019 visit to Capilano University’s Blueshore Theatre – again mourning “the ghost of our love” with both sorrow and anger.
The Ghost Song recording opens with ethereal winds as her voice fades in for a cover of Kate Bush’s literary song of nightmare and haunting Wuthering Heights – the entry of the bass synth riff is even more chilling than Bush’s original. The album ends with the a cappella Unquiet Grave whose fadeout vocal improvisation returns to the opening theme from Wuthering Heights giving the whole recording a circular structure.
In concert, the final encore begins with Wuthering Heights but the startling bass synth riff is transformed into a lyrical piano theme supplied by Fortner which gently segues into an unexpected cover of Kate Bush’s Breathing providing a breathless conclusion to a riveting performance.
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Cécile McLorin Salvant performs at the Vancouver Playhouse Monday, June 27, 2022 as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.
— by Nou Dadoun
