By Jane Cornwell
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Cécile McLorin Salvant may or may not have a mermaid’s tail or a pair of wings sprouting from her back.
“You never know,” says the multi-Grammy-winning jazz singer with a laugh, Zooming from her home in Brooklyn, New York, in a pair of big, green glasses, their rims pierced with pins and rings. “I could be swishing as we speak.”
We are talking about her seventh album Mélusine, a mainly French-language gem whose diverse range of songs – some of them her own, others dating back to the 12th century – combines to tell the European folkloric legend of Mélusine, a woman who becomes a serpent from the waist down on Saturdays and who, after being spied upon by her lover, turns into a dragon and takes flight.
Jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant.Credit: Karolis Kaminskas
“These female creatures are loaded with metaphor,” says the Miami-born Salvant, recently home after wowing at Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival. She performed two shows: a concert of jazz standards and rare musical discoveries sung in English, French and Haitian Creole (her teacher mother is French, her doctor father is from Haiti), and the UK premiere of Ogresse, an orchestral suite about a lovesick, overweight monster who lives in a forest (tagline: She falls in love. She eats the guy. She dies).
“My Mélusine wanted her privacy, her room of one’s own, and that gets betrayed. It’s this thing of how difficult and contradictory it is to be in a woman’s body. It can be uncomfortable, even scary. You might want to be invisible. Or you might want to be seen and desired.”
Salvant has only performed the darkly humorous Ogresse a handful of times since debuting the piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. Her self-penned libretto takes digs at sexism, racism and fat-phobia, and inspiration from both the female Haitian vaudon (“voodoo”) loa/goddess Erzulie, and the tragic true story of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman with protruding buttocks who was exhibited/exploited in 19th-century European ‘freak shows’. Duality, again, is a theme.
“The strong, beautiful woman, this ‘I am perfect as I am’, but I also like the idea of the deeply flawed, troubled, ugly female and what that means,” she says.
“I am so attracted to, and a bit afraid of, these female monster archetypes. They have a fierceness and power that I don’t have and wish I had.”
Jazz, for Salvant, isn’t only about singing, even if her voice is an instrument so pristine, elastic and all-stops-out glorious it has critics swooning. In 2017 the revered jazz trumpeter/educator Wynton Marsalis declared,“You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.” To which we might add, you get a singer like this who explores intersectionality, whose visual aesthetic involves her own multimedia artwork, who covers everything from baroque “mad songs” to Barbra Streisand bangers, who experiments with electronics and who sometimes sings in the ancient Occitan language.
Cécile McLorin Salvant has won three Grammys.Credit: Karolis Kaminskas
“Jazz has long been associated with race, diversity, radical ideas. It has a rich feminist history and a rich queer history,” says Salvant, a self-proclaimed “maximalist” who started learning classical piano aged four and joined the Miami Choral Society aged eight. Whose musical tastes were shaped by those of her liberal, well-travelled parents: classical, opera, hip-hop, soul, Latin, jazz. Folk sounds from Europe. Rhythms from the Caribbean and West Africa. “When you have access to all that as a child, it opens up your world.”
At 18 she relocated to the university city of Aix-en-Provence in southern France, close to where her maternal grandmother lived, to do a bachelor’s in law and a stint in the classical music program at the conservatory.
On a whim, she took up jazz. The more she listened to the likes of Carmen McRae, Abbey Lincoln and Bessie Smith, divas celebrated for their wise-cracking lines and note-bending renditions, the more it appealed. Her teacher, a reeds player, was so dazzled by Salvant’s prowess that he formed a band, Cécile & the Jean-François Bonnel Paris Quintet, and released an album in 2010.
That same year she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition and figured she’d better move to New York. There she took classes in composition and music theory at the New School in Greenwich Village and sought out musicians similarly keen to subvert the Great American Songbook, to add intellectual rigour to tunes such as Valaida Snow’s racist 1935 ditty You Bring Out the Savage in Me, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s Wives and Lovers (1963).
Salvant’s passion for “nerdy research” – tracing the family trees of songs and historical figures, reading books on myth, psychology, visual art – informs her choice of covers and subject. But inspiration can strike from anywhere. Salvan thrives on unruliness. On surprise.
Cécile McLorin Salvant posing with her Grammy in 2019.Credit: Getty
If she upset purists with her edgy interpretations of familiar songs, so be it (her angular take on Pirate Jenny from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera led to a Scottish critic walking out of her Edinburgh gig). “We do the songs differently each show.” A good-natured shrug. “What is played as a slow ballad one night might have swing and energy the next time. It depends what everybody is doing – the pianist, drummer, double bassist. We’re all feeding off each other.”
And after three Grammy wins for consecutive albums For One to Love (in 2016), Dreams and Daggers (in 2018) and The Window (in 2019), the accolades have kept rolling in. In 2020 Salvant received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the only musician among 21 winners from fields including literature, neuroscience and engineering. She was hunkered down in Harlem when she heard.
“Lockdown had been so isolating,” she says. “But with no audience or feedback I felt free to pursue ideas I’d been thinking twice about.”
Cécile McLorin Salvant performing in New Orleans. Credit: Getty
One of which is her spectral take on Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights (“the best adaptation of the book”), a highlight of 2022’s acclaimed Ghost Song, an album informed by the pandemic’s othering of time, and by the deaths of Salvant’s grandmother and her friend and drummer Lawrence Leathers. The album was released on the same day her first solo art exhibition, also titled Ghost Song, opened at a Brooklyn gallery.
Mélusine comes accompanied by a book of her drawings, many of which (dragons in flight, a woman with a tail, a woman alone in a forest), and more, are projected onto a screen throughout Ogresse – whose story Salvant is currently turning into an animated 80-minute film. She is also working on a new album of original material, and another with a French symphony orchestra, between basking in the love on stages in Europe, Australia and the US. A few weeks after our interview she performed America the Beautiful live at the US Open Women’s Singles Final, wearing a white maxi-dress and her oversized green pierced glasses.
“Once upon a time the thought of performing in public horrified me,” she says. “Then l slowly started looking at the audience and enjoying the moment, even though I’m shy and don’t like being gawked at.
“But I do love that transformational space because I get to be this other type of creature when I get out there. Louder, bigger, more exaggerated. And it’s not ridiculous.”
She smiles, and shimmies – swishes? – her shoulders. “It’s expected.”
Cécile McLorin Salvant will perform at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival on Sunday, October 29, and at the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival on Tuesday, October 31.
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