ADVANCE: Cecile McLorin Salvant - Ghost Song (March 4, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

1. Wuthering Heights

2. Optimistic Voices / No Love Dying

3. Ghost Song

4. Obligation

5. Until

6. I Lost My Mind

7. Moon Song

8. Trail Mix

9. The World Is Mean

10. Dead Poplar

11. Thunderclouds

12. Unquiet Grave

PREORDER

Cécile McLorin Salvant delivers intimate home performance to raise funds for public health in Haiti

Grammy Award-Winning Artist Cécile McLorin Salvant 

& Sullivan Fortner

Deliver an Intimate Home Performance

to Raise Funds for GHESKIO in Haiti

Grammy Award-winning artist Cécile McLorin Salvant has partnered with the Haitian Global Health Alliance to release an intimate fundraising performance, At Home, recorded in her Brooklyn loft. The video will be available for viewing from May 10 – 31, with all proceeds benefiting GHESKIO, a world-renowned public health organization serving patients in Haiti.

“Ms. Salvant has been a generous musical champion for Haitian causes, including GHESKIO,” said Scott Morgan, Executive Director of the Haitian Global Health Alliance. “Her vocal talent and genre-spanning repertoire are unmatched in the jazz world today.” 

Tickets to view this exclusive performance, which includes Salvant with pianist Sullivan Fortner, are available through May 31, 2021 at gheskio.org for a name-your-price donation. 100% of proceeds will support GHESKIO.

A composer, singer and cross-disciplinary visual artist, Salvant has received Grammy© Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for her three latest albums. In 2020, she received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award. More about Cécile McLorin Salvant, her music, art and photos can be found at cecilemclorinsalvant.com

About GHESKIO

GHESKIO, which operates a network of clinics in Port-au-Prince and throughout Haiti, is an international leader in clinical care and research for HIV, tuberculosis and other infectious and chronic diseases. Since the earliest days of the HIV epidemic, GHESKIO has been at the forefront of the HIV response, implementing testing and prevention strategies and treatment protocols that have influenced guidelines worldwide. GHESKIO has been a leader in Haiti’s decrease in HIV prevalence from 6.2% in 1993 to the current level of less than 2.0%. GHESKIO is also the Caribbean’s largest provider of tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment. GHESKIO is world-renowned for its research, with more than 35 years of continuous support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for clinical trials and decades of support from PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) for treatment and care of people living with HIV in Haiti. GHESKIO is a member of the prestigious AIDS Clinical Trials Group, and GHESKIO researchers have published over 250 peer-reviewed publications.

About the Haitian Global Health Alliance

The Haitian Global Health Alliance is a U.S.-based 501(c)3 organization that provides fundraising and communication support for GHESKIO.

Contact Scott Morgan

scott@hgha.org

973-865-0128

Cécile McLorin Salvant - The Window (MACK AVENUE RECORDS September 28, 2018)

Cécile McLorin Salvant Explores Mercurial Nature

of Love on Stunning Duo Album with

Critically Acclaimed Pianist Sullivan Fortner

The Window — Available September 28

via Mack Avenue Records

Cécile McLorin Salvant

The world first learned of the incredible vocal artistry of Cécile McLorin Salvant when she won the prestigious 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. In just under the span of a decade she has evolved into a multi-GRAMMY® Award-winner (with all three Mack Avenue Records releases receiving nominations, and the last two winning the Best Jazz Vocal Album category) and a prescient and fearless voice in music today.

Her newest release, The Window, an album of duets with the pianist Sullivan Fortner, explores and extends the tradition of the piano-vocal duo and its expressive possibilities. With just Fortner’s deft accompaniment to support McLorin Salvant, the two are free to improvise and rhapsodize, to play freely with time, harmony, melody, and phrasing.


Each new recording by McLorin Salvant reveals new aspects of her artistry. WomanChild and For One To Love established her style, her command, and interpretive range. Dreams and Daggers is a work that highlights her fresh and fearless approach to art that transcends the conventional—live and in the studio, with a trio and with a string quartet, standards and original compositions—held together by a vocal delivery that cuts against the grain, ever deepening, intensifying, and nuancing the lyrics.

Sullivan Fortner

Thematically, The Window is a meditative cycle of songs about the mercurial nature of love. The duo explores the theme across a wide repertory that includes Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim, the inner-visionary Stevie Wonder, gems of French cabaret, and early Rhythm and Blues, alongside McLorin Salvant’s brilliant, original compositions. Just as a window frames a view—revealing as much as it hides, connecting as much as it separates—each song on the album offers a shifting and discerning perspective on love’s emotional complexity. McLorin Salvant sings of anticipation and joy, obsession and madness, torment and longing, tactics and coyness. The Window traverses love’s wide universe, from the pleasure of a lover’s touch with its feelings of human communion, to the invisible masks we wear to hide from others and from ourselves.

Her gifts as an artist are rooted in her intensive study of the history of American Music and her uncanny ability to curate its treasures for her audience. Her albums are explorations of the immense repository of experience and feeling that abound in popular song. She understands the special role of the musician to find and share the emotions and messages in music that speak to our past, present and future. “I am not interested in the idea of relevance,” she explains. “I am interested in the idea of presence. I want to communicate across time, through time, play with time.”

Onstage, her persona is often compared to that of an actress. But, as McLorin Salvant notes, “jazz would not be what it is without its theatrical origins, vaudeville, and minstrel shows.” Through her selection of repertory and brilliant interpretations, she “plays with time,” making the musical past speak to our contemporary world. Historically, her unflinching performance of songs from the minstrel tradition challenge us to think harder about race in America today. Her ironic, even sinister, rendition of songs explore the complex intertwining of sex, gender, and power. Her blues numbers are bawdy and vibrant, melancholic and forlorn, insistent and emancipatory.

She sings of the ecstasy and agony of love, of jubilation and dejection, of desire and being desired, of fearlessness and fragility. “I want to get as close to the center of the song as I can,” McLorin Salvant explains. “When I find something, beautiful and touching I try to get close to it and share that with the audience.” Immersed in the song and yet completely in control, McLorin Salvant brings her immense personality to the music—daring, witty, playful, honest, and mischievous. 

All of McLorin Salvant’s study, training, creativity, intelligence, and artistry come together in her voice on The Window. The sound of her voice covers the gamut from breathy to bold, deep and husky to high and resonant, limpid to bluesy, with a clarity and richness that is nearly unparalleled. When she first burst onto the jazz scene, many listeners were struck by her ability to recall the sound of Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughan, or Betty Carter. Yet with each new album, McLorin Salvant’s voice has become more her own, more singular. While conjuring the spirits of the ancestors, her references are controlled, focused, and purposeful. Her remarkable vocal technique never overshadows her rich interpretations of songs both familiar and obscure.

Touched at every moment by Cécile McLorin Salvant’s brilliance, The Window is a dazzling new release from an artist who is surely, to quote Duke Ellington, “beyond category.

1 Visions

2 One Step Ahead

3 By Myself

4 The Sweetest Sounds

5 Ever Since the One I Love's Been Gone

6 À Clef

7 Obsession

8 Wild is Love

9 J’ai L’Cafard

10 Somewhere

11 The Gentleman is a Dope

12 Trouble is a Man

13 Were Thine That Special Face

14 I've Got Your Number

15 Tell Me Why

16 Everything I've Got Belongs to You

17 The Peacocks

www.cecilemclorinsalvant.com

Festival International de Jazz de Montréal: Jazz, jazz...and only jazz!

Cécile McLorin Salvant

June 28 • Théâtre Maisonneuve, PdA

Buy

Terence Blanchard featuring the E-Collective

July 1 • Monument-National

Buy

Herbie Hancock / Thundercat

July 2 • Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, PdA

Buy

Chet Doxas, Rich in Symbols

July 3 • Gesù 

Buy

Leslie Odom, Jr. / Jill Barber

July 6 • Théâtre Maisonneuve, PdA

Buy

Cécile McLorin Salvant – Dreams and Daggers (MACK AVENUE RECORDS 2017)

Shortly following Cécile McLorin Salvant’s emergence on the music scene, New York Times critic Stephen Holden stated, “As Cécile McLorin Salvant spun songs into a brilliant silk tapestry, I thought, if anyone can extend the lineage of the Big Three -- Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald -- it is this 23-year-old virtuoso.” Downbeat added emphasis to Holden’s sentiment by awarding Cécile top position in an unprecedented 4 categories in its 2014 Annual Critics Poll. And Wynton Marsalis commented “you get a singer like this once in a generation or two.”

With her 2016 Grammy Award winning album For One to Love, Cécile McLorin Salvant revealed that she is not just a sublime vocalist, but a supremely gifted storyteller and composer as well. Cécile is being embraced by music lovers at major festivals and clubs throughout the world. Her remarkable voice and striking ability to inhabit the emotional space and turn every song she performs into theater make her an artist of consequence to be celebrated and enjoyed.

Fred Nardin & Jon Boutellier 4tet - Watt's (2016)

A qui voudra se lancer dans la carrière du jazz, on pourra conseiller de jeter un coup d'oeil à ce Watt's équilibré, gréé de ce qu'il faut de maîtrise autant que de folie, de morceaux de jouissances béates les plus grands publics aux clins d'oeil presque hardcore destinés à un auditoire plus fanatique et restreint. Qui voudra se lancer dans cette carrière pourrait s'inspirer des deux leaders, échappées d'une promo du CNSM qui ne manque pas de talent, et pollinise toujours plus le jazz français, à travers notamment l'Amazing Keystone Big Band où l'on retrouve en sus de Boutellier et Nardin ainsi que David Enhco et Bastien Ballaz, ici invités.

Watt's va surtout piocher, comme tant d'autres albums mais bien mieux que beaucoup, dans l'âge d'or des années 50 et 60, notamment le hard-bop : le pianiste Fred Nardin s'inspire de Tommy Flanagan pour composer « Round Twenty Blues », de Winton Kelly pour un solo enflammé et virtuose qui ne dénote pas avec votre discothèque du meilleur de Blue Note. D'ailleurs, à être juste et circonspect, le pianiste ne cesse d'impressionner, en soliste ou avec la section, par une discrétion générale et élégante officiant comme rampe de lancement vers des fulgurances parfois moins feutrées, toujours justes (« Highlander's Walk », si l'on veut).

L'ensemble du quartet fonctionne cela dit avec une homogénéité de talents et de bonne entente palpable, soulignée par chaque solo de l'un ou de l'autre. La section rythmique offre une ossature à l'exquise fermeté pour l'ensemble de ce Watt's, mâtinée du groove de la basse de Patrick Maradan – parfois aidée par les arpèges et autres block chords de Nardin – ainsi que du swing de Romain Sarron à la batterie.

N.B. : qu'on soit bien clair, Jon Boutellier, c'est très bien aussi, je ne savais simplement pas trop où le caler dans cette chronique.

Les invités – copains, amis, ce qu'on voudra – font des interventions nombreuses mais sachant ne pas se montrer trop invasives ; y compris les deux standards où chante, divine, Cécile McLorin Salvant. Au contraire, ces featuring révèlent plus encore l'art consommé de ce quartet, dans la réalisation aussi bien que dans l'écriture et l'arrangement, ici ciselés avec un perfectionnisme presque inquiétant : « The Gentleman is a dope », avec Bastien Ballaz, David Enhco et Cécile McLorin Salvant, un tube ; plus encore le « Chinoiserie » osé d'Ellington.

En cent mot comme en un, Watt's déchire, dans un jazz presque historique, qui lasse souvent à passer le cap du disque. Rien de tout ça ici, ce quartet diablement fin et libéré parvenant à trouver le fil rouge d'une musicalité généreuse, touche-à-tout, parfois inconvenante, le plus souvent bienvenue. Pierre Tenne

01. Watt's

02. Round Twenty Blues

03. The Gentleman Is a Dope

04. Hope

05. Highlander's Walk

06. East of the Sun

07. Not so Cold

08. Yatchan

09. Stevie the Great

10. Chinoiserie

Fred Nardin - piano

Jon Boutellier - tenor sax

Patrick Maradan - bass

Romain Sarron - drums

Cécile McLorin Salvant - vocals (3, 6)

David Enhco - trumpet (3, 6, 10)

Bastien Ballaz - trombone (3, 6, 10)

BUY THIS ALBUM!!!

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