NEW YORK, NY.- Since her arrival on the jazz scene about a dozen years ago, Cécile McLorin Salvant has made a practice of shining a black light on the unsavory history of American popular song. She sings standards, show tunes and old novelties in a taut, flinty, elusively beautiful voice, erring toward material with difficult lyrics and tough places in history. Salvant wins over her audiences by tweaking them slightly: daring them to go there with her — not just into the archive, but toward the darkness of the past.
Today, you’re as likely to hear jazz’s most decorated vocalist singing a tune such as “You Bring Out the Savage in Me” (a Valaida Snow vehicle from the mid-1930s that Salvant has called “so racist and perfect and hilarious”) or Burt Bacharach’s “Wives and Lovers” (sample lyric: “Wives should always be lovers, too / Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you / I’m warning you!”), as to find her doing the typical standard, or a jazz take on a pop tune, or an original.
But on “Ghost Song,” a new album out Friday, Salvant has applied that daring-to-go-there ethic to something else: herself, writing music that looks within and doesn’t blink. In conceiving the LP, Salvant spent more time leafing through her own notebooks than she did the Great American Songbook.
“Some of my favorite stuff to read is always the letters and the journals and diaries,” she said, talking about the artists that inspire her. “I love to see where the thinking happens, and I think I wanted, in a way, to share that. I wanted to translate that feeling to an album.”
Salvant, 32, was speaking via video chat from her apartment in central Brooklyn, and she brandished her notebook for the camera. It serves a lot of functions, she said: journal, day planner, sketch pad, lyric book.
“Ghost Song” is her first album to feature more originals than covers, and it breaks away hard from the sounds and structures of small-group jazz, which Salvant had been treating as a kind of gilded cage. At the same time, she’s keeping her links to the past, through the mixing bowl of styles in which she writes and the covers she has included. Some tracks feature a banjo, a flute and hand percussion, but no bassist or drummer. On one, a cathedral-grade pipe organ pushes the piano aside. All together, the result is her most revealing and rewarding record yet.
A kind of romantic wariness, bordering on pessimism, forms a leitmotif on this album — although it rarely tips into despair. It’s there on her blazing cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” and on “Dead Poplar,” for which Salvant put music to a letter Alfred Stieglitz had written Georgia O’Keeffe, in which he sounds both loving and conflicted. It should tell you something that the sunniest original composition on the album is called “Thunderclouds.”
The archive-trolling music for which she's best known has garnered Salvant a level of steadily mounting success that’s almost unheard of for a jazz musician these days. Each of her past three LPs won the Grammy for best jazz vocal album, and in 2020 she was named a MacArthur fellow. But as Salvant has embraced the unruliness of her creativity, she has realized that the boundaries holding her in place as a virtuoso jazz vocalist were always artificial.
The same day she releases “Ghost Song,” her first solo exhibition will open at Picture Room, a gallery near her home in central Brooklyn. The show, also titled “Ghost Song,” features a selection of her embroideries and drawings, which seem indebted in equal measure to the cutouts of Henri Matisse, the market paintings of Haitian tradition, the tapestries of Moki Cherry (“I’m obsessed,” Salvant said of the Swedish textile artist), and the eerie, 3D canvases that Salvant remembers seeing her sister, Aisha McLorin, make when she was younger.
She has also been applying a designer’s eye to her own attire, which in the past few years has grown explosively colorful. Performing at BRIC JazzFest in October, in a duet with pianist Sullivan Fortner — her frequent creative partner and her co-producer on “Ghost Song” — Salvant wore a flowing purple dress, silver boots and a wiry, oversize necklace that she had made herself, as she volleyed comfortably with Fortner over standards and Sondheim.
“It’s very rare that we’ll actually talk about music. We never practice together,” Fortner said in a phone interview, explaining that they’re more likely to visit a museum in their off hours. “Her awareness of all of the arts informs her music, and it’s taught me to kind of do the same.”
A big moment of creative unfastening for her arrived not long before the pandemic, when Salvant wrote “Ogresse,” a concert-length musical fairy tale that tells the story of a large beast with “chocolate brown” skin who lives in the woods and feasts on the people who come near her. Salvant first came to the idea for “Ogresse” after being struck by a painting by Haitian artist Gerard Fortune depicting an Erzulie, or Voudou deity, whose urine becomes a flourishing stream full of fish.
Salvant has since recorded “Ogresse,” which features a 13-piece chamber orchestra conducted by Darcy James Argue, and she intends to release it as an album. She’s also at work on a feature-length animated film to accompany the music, using her own drawings.
For Salvant, coming into herself as a multidimensional artist has had a feeling of return. “It’s like this weird optical illusion, I guess, where it does feel like suddenly now I’m beginning to be on this quest — and in fact, I was always on it,” she said. “I remember lists of things I wanted to do as a kid: I wanted to be a playwright and I wanted to be an actress, and I wanted to design the sets of the plays that I wrote.”
Salvant grew up in Miami surrounded by music, but she didn’t take an immediate interest in jazz. Her parents and grandparents, who hailed from Haiti and Guadeloupe, listened to some, but it struck her as belonging to a culture that wasn’t fully hers. “For me, it started off as thinking that it was completely dead and dried up,” she said. “There was something almost as exotic about it as the Paraguayan folk music that my mom used to listen to. It was just one of many world musics in the house.”
At university in France, taking classical voice lessons while studying political science and law, Salvant felt herself being pushed toward jazz — partly because of others’ expectations, she said, but also by her own curiosity. “I was in a music school where there was a jazz program, and I was the only” — she hesitated — “American there. And they’re like, ‘It’s your music, you need to sing,’” Salvant said. “It’s so strange. It’s like that in-between space of: This is an exotic thing, but this is also the way in which I connect back to the country that I was born in, and this homesickness that I felt.”
Jazz also proved a worthy outlet for her historical drive. Even now, as she has delved into more personal songwriting, that hasn’t meant abandoning her interest in the archive; much the opposite. “There’s something about us being so obsessed with our own time. I think that’s the tendency, and it’s so self-centered, so narcissistic in a way,” Salvant said. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s been around for thousands upon thousands of years, a lot of storytelling devices. And in a way, it’s quite humbling, and also really inspiring.”
It was her love of Baroque “mad songs” — a genre with its own troubling history, related to the exploitation and othering that mentally ill patients were subjected to in 17th-century England — that led her to write “I Lost My Mind,” from “Ghost Song.” It starts with a verse of jazz-genre balladry (“Here am I, lounging on the sands of my hourglass / Watching the time drip, sand sketching strange glyphs / Feeling my mind slip off a cliff”), then dissolves into an echoing incantation over Aaron Diehl’s pipe organ. Salvant’s voice, overdubbed upon itself, deadpans: “I lost my mind / Can you help me find my mind?”
On “Ghost Song,” she’s also on a mission to punch up the jazz ballad for the 21st century, and she does two covers that could well become new standards: Sting’s plangent “Until” and Gregory Porter’s triumphant “No Love Dying” (which she and Fortner deftly combine, on Track 2, with “Optimistic Voices,” a chipper tune from “The Wizard of Oz”).
“It lifts everything up to have standards that we all play that are written by our peers, and I just feel like that’s missing a little bit,” Salvant said of the contemporary jazz scene. “I’m not saying that it’ll be ‘No Love Dying,’ but I hope it happens with something.”
She has written a moving ballad of her own, too: “Moon Song,” a kind of companion piece to the album’s bluesier, aching title track. “Moon Song” has the aesthetic of classic jazz, with Diehl leading a piano trio behind her, but its words meditate on the dangers and discomforts of love, in a way that few old standards do. But none of this feels totally fatalistic. More than anything, “Moon Song” is a demand for love without sacrifice — which is to say, devotion without possession.
Let me pine, let me yearn
Let me crawl, let me write you a song
And long to belong to you
Write you a song from a distance
Let me love you like I love the moon.
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Cécile McLorin Salvant
Cécile McLorin Salvant will perform music from “Ghost Song” at Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York City, on May 12 and 13; jazz.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
