Cécile McLorin Salvant

Cécile McLorin Salvant (vocals), is a composer, singer, and visual artist. The late Jessye Norman described Salvant as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings.”

Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, Baroque, and folkloric music. She is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor.

Salvant won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010. She has received three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for The Window, Dreams and Daggers, and For One To Love, and was nominated for the award in 2014 for her album WomanChild.

Born and raised in Miami, Florida, of a French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at age five, began singing in a children’s choir at eight, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager. In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released her Ghost Song in March 2022, and she has since gone onto receive two Grammy nominations as well as appearing on a number of year-end “best” lists for 2022. Last March, Nonesuch Records released Salvant’s highly anticipated and now Grammy-nominated follow up, Mélusine, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl.

Salvant received a bachelor’s degree in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble while also studying Baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Her latest work, Ogresse, is a musical fable in the form of a cantata that blends genres (folk, Baroque, jazz, country). With story, lyrics, and music by Salvant, it is arranged by Darcy James Argue for a 13-piece orchestra of multi-instrumentalists. Ogresse, both a “biomythography” and an homage to the Erzulie (as painted by Gerard Fortune) and Sara Baart­man, explores fetishism, hunger, diaspora, cycles of appropriation, lies, othering, and ecology. It is in development to become an animated feature-length film, which Salvant will direct.

Salvant makes large-scale textile drawings. Her visual art can now be found at Picture Room in Brooklyn, NY.