20 Feb 2018

Dreams and Daggers by Cecile McLorin Salvant

From The Sampler, 7:30 pm on 20 February 2018

Nick Bollinger lends an ear to soon-to-tour jazz singer Cecile McLorin Salvant, and notes that she seems to be channelling the music's history.

Cecile McLorin Salvant

Cecile McLorin Salvant Photo: supplied

When I first heard this album, I remember thinking it was the best jazz vocal album I’d heard in a long while. Since then it’s won a Grammy – for Best Jazz Vocal Album – so I guess that’s official.

Dreams and Daggers

Dreams and Daggers Photo: supplied

Though still just in her twenties, Cecile McLorin Salvant (who will be playing festivals in both Auckland and Wellington next month) has already made several albums. This is the latest and most ambitious of them; a two-disc set that combines live recordings and studio ones, jazz trio accompaniments with string quartets.

Salvant’s voice would have been a remarkable instrument whether or not she had turned out to be an extraordinary improviser. Her pitch is precise and perfectly controlled, her voice is classic bel canto. In fact, this daughter of a Haitian father and French mother initially set out to sing opera. It was only once she got to the Darius Milhaud Conservatory in Provence that she began to explore jazz, at the suggestion of a tutor, who primed her with recordings of the greats – Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday – before leading her even further back into the music’s history. And it’s obvious that Salvant liked it.

‘Sam Jones Blues’ was originally recorded by Bessie Smith, the 1920s blues goddess, who – as Salvant told The New Yorker last year – “sang about sex and food and savages and the Devil and Hell and really exciting things you don’t hear on Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook”. The song might be nearly a century old but Salvant gets right inside its narrative. And her relationship to lyrics is one of the things for which she stands out. Where for some jazz singers words are just syllables to wrap a melody around, Salvant clearly enjoys the words themselves. She’s not just a singer but a storyteller, and she lets you hear what the song is saying.

If Salvant, as The New Yorker noted, ‘channels the history of jazz singing’ she is also very aware of the times she is singing in. So while the album encompasses standards from Gershwin to Ida Cox, there’s a kind of eye-rolling irony – however honestly she may like the tune - when she encounters the dated sentiment of a song like ‘If A Girl Isn’t Pretty’ from the musical Funny Girl.

By contrast, there’s also a scattering of songs on Dreams and Daggers based on the poetry of the late Langston Hughes, and a few that Salvant wrote herself, which suggest something else again: a kind of modern art song.

Dreams and Daggers packs plenty into its two discs: sophistication, raw humour, history, and a rare musicality. And I expect we’ll be experiencing all of that and more when Cecile McLorin Salvant plays here with her trio next month.

Dreams and Daggers is available through Southbound