Three Records by Cécile McLorin Salvant
Cecile McLorin Salvant
Episode:When You're Not Thinking About Anything
2013 debut, 2017 live record, 2022 experiment. Cécile McLorin Salvant stands in a different place on every album. Someone who began at the center of the jazz vocal tradition has somehow arrived somewhere no one else is standing. But the core of the voice doesn't change. What changes is the choice of what to sing with it.
A live recording. With near-duo intimacy alongside pianist Aaron Diehl, singing standards from the 1930s. 's voice whispers at one moment, stretches dramatically at the next. That range moves naturally within a single song. She has so completely made the old jazz vocal style her own that it sounds not like recreation but like the song is being sung for the very first time.
The debut album. Four years before Dreams and Daggers. The here is more composed, more inside the jazz vocal form. The high level of her standard-singing technique is front and center. The loosening heard on Dreams and Daggers hasn't happened yet. In its place you hear the quality of the voice itself with great clarity — the fatness of the low register, the transparency up high, the use of vibrato. The foundation she needed to become free four years later is all here.
Five more years after Dreams and Daggers. On this album barely sings standards. Mostly originals, mixed with Kate Bush and Sting covers and spoken poetry. The instrumentation — guitar, cello, harpsichord — steps outside the jazz format entirely. On WomanChild she was inside the standard form; on Dreams and Daggers she made that form her own; on Ghost Song she stepped outside it. But listen to the voice and all three records are clearly the same person singing.