A fearless and electrifying jazz vocalist of astonishing power and originality, Cécile McLorin Salvant has vaulted into the very top of the jazz singing pantheon since her 2010 win of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition. The Grammy-winning artist and songwriter has a voice that knows no bounds, deftly incorporating jazz, blues, folk and classical into her intoxicating sound.

“the finest jazz singer to emerge in the last decade” – The New York Times

Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, baroque and folkloric music. Salvant 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.

In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released Ghost Song in March 2022, and has since gone onto receive two Grammy Nominations as well as appearing on a number of year end best lists for 2022.

Born and raised in Miami, Florida, of a French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at 5, sang in a children’s choir at 8, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager.

Salvant received a bachelor’s 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.

Salvant’s latest work, Ogresse, is a musical fable in the form of a cantata that blends genres (folk, baroque, jazz, country). Salvant wrote the story, lyrics, and music. It is arranged by Darcy James Argue for a thirteen-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.

 

SULLIVAN FORTNER, piano

For the past decade, Sullivan Fortner has been stretching deep-rooted talents as a pianist, composer, band leader and uncompromising individualist. The GRAMMY Award-winning artist out of New Orleans received international praise as both key player and producer for his collaborative work on The Window (Mack Avenue, 2018), alongside multi-GRAMMY winner, vocalist-composer Cecile McLorin Salvant. As a solo leader, he has released Moments Preserved (Decca, 2018) and Aria (Impulse!, 2015) to critical acclaim, and he’s only getting started. Now based in New York, Fortner has earned recognition in multiple DownBeat Critics Poll categories, winning first place in Rising Star Piano and Rising Star Jazz Artist. Website

Note: For some concerts, the window behind the stage may need to be covered for acoustical purposes. We do not always know which artists will need the window closed, but at a certain level of amplification, it is necessary.