Cécile McLorin Salvant is a storyteller in song with a wide-ranging songbook that gives voice to her appeal as a luminous communicator. The Miami-born American singer is a child of Haitian and French diasporas, and sings with an immaculate bel canto in English, French and even Occitan. A passion for language and a crisp articulation combine with eclectic musical influences and make for a rising reputation in this three-time Grammy-winning singer’s magnetic performances. It was no lesser than Wynton Marsalis who said, "You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.”
She and her collegial group, performing at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, brought an exquisite seventy-minute set of songs judiciously picked from her seven albums to date. These include the Grammy award winning second and third collections For One To Love and Dreams and Daggers, and last year’s Ghost Song. Salvant's seventh album Mélusine recounts the European folk legend of Mélusine with songs in French and Haitian Creole. Her catalogue imbues a unique identity beginning in jazz and blues, reaching out through pop, musical theatre and art music of the avant-garde, and even lachrymose Renaissance madrigals.
Introducing Flow Not So Fast Ye Fountain by the late-16th early-17th century composer John Dowland, an audience member nominated him “the Jimi Hendrix of the lute!”— a welcome heckle she responded to with thanks. A meeting of music separated by centuries is exactly the kind of encounter that she specialises in. Our lad the moderately famous Sting is a Renaissance man who has also recorded Dowland, and whose amazing song Until is one of many beautiful treasures among her selections that she just makes her own with customary respect for both source and audience.
These selections ranged from barnstorming familiar opener Don’t Rain On My Parade into deep cut classics Wives and Lovers by Burt Bacharach (and Hal David at his most Sonheimesque), twinned with Frank Loesser’s sardonic Never Will I Marry, certainly developing a theme of gently perplexed fascination at the foibles of relationships, most deliciously unpacked in her own song Obligation. A cappella, she sings "Expectations are premeditated resentments" — a gut punch to lead into her what’s almost an art piece, a scabrous conversation between R.D. Laing and Diamanda Galás.
Throughout her work is a very serious social and political commitment, realised in her readings of Weill and Brecht (and his uncredited collaborator Elizabeth Hauptmann, as she valuably reminds us) of The World Is Mean as well as her chillingly beautiful setting of a poem by Léo Ferré called Est-ce ainsi que les hommes vivent? The set’s climactic moment is in Build a House a powerful political blues by Grammy Award-winning musician, MacArthur recipient and Pulitzer Prize winner Rhiannon Giddens. She transfers herself into a sterner, harder blues singer of tradition of strong female genius, another shade of her astonishing range.
The encore is of course her spacious delivery of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, shorn of its chart topping bombast, and richly augmented with appropriately Celtic vocal ornamentations that show a deep understanding of her source. It always seems too short, but now segues into another Bush classic to close, Breathing about Bush’s mother’s battle with terminal lung cancer. Without any of the usual manipulative tricks we associate with the diva role, she had me properly sobbing, as she closed out with a fragile but firm a cappella as the air momentarily left the room. Out, in, out, in, out…
She is direct without being confrontational. Whether in close companionship with the superb band including a special rapport with the wizard-like pianist Sullivan Fortner, or leaning out from the front of the stage and into your soul from hers, she portrays a vivid intimacy and a sense that she, of all divas, is somehow supernaturally present — there and real, abidingly modern, yet timeless and everywhere. A.J. Dehany
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