Cécile McLorin Salvant

Cécile McLorin Salvant, is a composer, singer, and visual artist who 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 and received three consecutive Grammys for best jazz vocal album, for The Window, Dreams and Daggers, and For One To Love. She was nominated for a Grammy for WomanChild.

In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Recent albums, on Nonesuch, include the Grammy-nominated Ghost Song and Mélusine, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl.

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

Her 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, and it was arranged by Darcy James Argue for a 13-piece orchestra of multi-instrumentalists. Ogresse is both a bio-mythography 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 also makes large-scale textile drawings.