by Susan Kepecs
I’m not as good at keeping up these days as
I used to be. One late Tuesday afternoon
last summer while waiting for Ben Sidran to crank up the groove for the second
set of his weekly warm weather salon for secular humanists, arch democrats and
freethinkers, I found myself holding court at a little round table in the
Cardinal Ballroom at what’s now known as Nomad World Pub, complaining about the
state of jazz today among the up-and-coming generation. It’s so academic, so lacking in soul and
grit!
“Ah,” said a friend, “then you
don’t know about Cécile McLorin Salvant!” I didn’t. But now we all get a chance
to catch up with what’s happenin’ in jazz, because McLorin Salvant plays the
Wisconsin Union Theater’s Shannon Hall next Thursday, March 8.
The high song priestesses of an
earlier era made their music from the bitterness of racism, sweetened with the
honey of the black church. Unlike them, McLorin Salvant comes from a family of
successful professionals and her musical foundations are classical voice and
piano. At eighteen she went to France – her father is Haitian, her mother is
French – to study classical voice at a conservatory in Aix-en-Provence while
digging into political science and law on the side. There she tumbled into jazz
by accident, say those who know, when her mother discovered a class in jazz
singing on the curriculum and talked her into taking it. To her surprise, she fell in love. In 2010 she won the Thelonious Monk
competition (while diligently studying law) and then, like almost all jazz
musicians of her generation, she she ended up doing time in the academy, at the
School of Jazz at the New School in Manhattan.
Today at 28 she’s a phenom, with
four albums out and armloads of awards including the Grammy for Best Vocal Jazz
Album – twice (in 2015 and 2017). She’s
also got a few wonderful drawings (I think they’re in ink) scattered around the
internet – there are a few on her own website, and they're worth looking up.
Most writers who’ve scored
interviews with McLorin (I didn’t, though I tried for weeks), like Fred Kaplan,
who writes for Slate and The New Yorker and who profiled her in the May 22, 2017 issue of the latter, portray her as studious and sort of proper.
But jazz pianist Ethan Iverson, until recently of The Bad Plus, got her to open
up and really talk about who she is today and how she got there for a piece
that’s posted on his blog, Do The M@th.
It’s a great interview; let me refer you to that.
Having not interviewed McLorin Salvant, and
having not yet seen her in performance, all I can tell you is that
what distinguishes her from many in her generation is easy to
pinpoint. What she lacks in old-school grit she makes up for in quality. She swings her superbly malleable set of
pipes through a vast repertory of jazz and blues standards with stylistic
flexibility and emotional range that recalls the Great Ladies. She’s enormously expressive, bringing to
light again the emotional depths of songs long left behind. But what makes
McLorin Salvant a singer for our times, according to The Nation’s music critic David Hadju – this you can’t tell from a
YouTube video – is a sly but penetrating feminism she lays over those wrenching
old songs, born in a weighted epoch of high misogyny. Hallelujah for that.
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