Cécile McLorin Salvant, 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. 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. On March 24th, 2023 Nonesuch Records released the highly anticipated follow up Mélusine, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English and Haitian Kreyòl.
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.