Wynton Marsalis knows musical talent when he hears it. After considering the attributes of jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, the trumpeter is convinced of her greatness.
“She has poise, elegance, soul, humor, sensuality, power, virtuosity, range, insight, intelligence, depth, and grace,” Marsalis says of the 27-year-old McLorin Salvant, who has been thrilling listeners at concert halls and festivals across America and Europe since she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition in 2010.
McLorin Salvant, who “radiates authority and delivers a set with almost a dramatic arc” (The New York Times), opens the Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State 2017–18 season in a September 14 concert with her band (piano, bass, and drums) at Schwab Auditorium.
Raised in a bilingual Miami home, the daughter of a French mother and a Haitian father, McLorin Salvant started singing at age 8 with the Miami Choral Society. After graduating from a Miami magnet high school, she ventured to Aix-en-Provence to study French law plus classical and Baroque singing. There, in the south of France, she also began to sing jazz.
“I’ve never heard a singer of her generation who has such a command of styles ranging from Bessie Smith to Betty Carter,” says jazz pianist and composer Aaron Diehl. “To have an artist with such a handle on jazz vocabulary while being extremely expressive and soulful, that’s very rare.”
McLorin Salvant’s most recent release, For One to Love, won the 2016 Grammy Award for best jazz vocal album.
The singer — who is fascinated by the history of American music and the connections among jazz, vaudeville, blues, and folk — meticulously selects her repertoire. She’s known for unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten gems that tell powerful stories.
The DownBeat International Critics Poll selected the vocalist’s debut recording, WomanChild (2013), as jazz album of the year.
WomanChild lovingly acknowledges the iconic women of jazz. “If anyone can extend the lineage of the Big Three — Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald — it is this … virtuoso,” writes a critic for The New York Times.
“There is a sexy swagger in her voice as she finesses these old chestnuts, breathing life into songs that were composed and sung long before she was born,” observes a reviewer for San Diego County News. “Cécile McLorin Salvant creates illusions in her singing by getting inside her song the way an actress gets inside a role.”
Her second album, For One to Love (2015), not only channels her personality into the music of her predecessors, it also makes a powerful statement on romance through her own compositions. Five of the album’s tracks feature songs written by the singer.
Patricia Best and Thomas Ray sponsor the performance. For information about the Center for the Performing Arts 2017–18 season, go to cpa.psu.edu beginning June 12. Tickets for the McLorin Salvant concert and other presentations go on sale June 26.
