Cécile McLorin Salvant – Something Old, Something New

It was the lead-off song on her 2013 release, WomanChild, a guitar/vocal take on ‘St Louis Gal’, that first alerted you to the fact that Cécile McLorin Salvant was something out of the ordinary. Immersing herself in the early jazz and blues vocal tradition, the album’s eclectic track list marked the winner of the 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition out as someone who was happily ploughing their own artistic furrow, from including the remarkable 19th century work song about the black folk hero ‘John Henry’ – which she first heard sung by blues guitarist and singer Big Bill Broonzy – to highlighting the singularly gritty timbre of the banjo on ‘Nobody’, Bert Williams’ signature song first publicly performed in 1906. Garnering a Grammy nomination and four Downbeat awards, including Jazz Album of the Year, McLorin Salvant was surprised as anyone by the album’s phenomenal critical success.

“It was crazy, I didn’t expect it at all,” she tells me, sipping tea in the lobby of Club Quarters, Trafalgar Square. “I’m still coming from a place where I feel like I never win anything. As a child I always felt that way – I always wanted an award, a shiny golden thing. So I’m really surprised and it takes me back to being a 10-year-old.” Attending the Grammy Awards with her father, mother and sister was, “a lot of fun, though if I’d known how long a day it was I may have picked some more appropriate footwear”.

If WomanChild deliberately eschewed songs about love, For One to Love does quite the opposite. “Absolutely, it is about love,” McLorin Salvant says. “It is about experiencing that as a woman, which is different, I think, from experiencing it as a man. I wanted to explore this because I had been, personally, going through a lot of weird, tricky feelings in my own life in terms of being in love, and not necessarily having it be mutual, or not being brave enough to tell the person that I love them. So it gets really, deeply, almost diary entry personal. All the songs I wrote, there’s not one that is a story. They’re all more or less concealed declarations – of love, or personal ponderings about how things didn’t work out, or how things can be miraculous when they do work out.

“It’s the first thing I’ve recorded where I’m actually, not proud, but happy about what I’ve done,” she continues. “And that’s really rare for me. I feel like, with this, I’ve gotten closer with the band to what I’ve been hearing in my head. It’s not quite there yet, but I am really happy.”

When we spoke previously, McLorin Salvant talked about the writing process as being a challenge. Having penned no less than five songs on For One to Love, I wonder if composing has got any easier for her?

“It’s probably more of an effort now,” she says. “On WomanChild I wrote essentially two and a half songs, because I didn’t write the lyrics for the one in French [‘Le Front Caché Sur Tes Genoux’]. This album was coming from such a personal place – things that I could have said, if I’d had the courage to say them – that it was relatively easy. Now what’s making it hard is that I’m trying to get away from that. I’m trying to tell stories and be a little less selfish in my writing: see the world, go out into the world, and tell those stories. And that’s hard.”

As on WomanChild, in which she covered ‘Baby Have Pity On Me’, the new album features a similarly compelling take on another song associated with Bessie Smith, ‘What’s The Matter Now?’ In capturing the honesty and authenticity of Smith’s delivery, the song strikes you with a visceral force. Having studied the entire recorded output of the Empress of the Blues, Smith still clearly looms large in McLorin Salvant’s aesthetic orbit.

“Her power, in every sense of the word, is the major thing that moves me,” she notes. “With her voice, she just cuts through everything. And, with such power, she was able to evoke so much vulnerability and tenderness. The first time I heard ‘What’s The Matter Now?’, she just got me with this line where she says, ‘Ain’t seen you honey since well last spring, tell me pretty papa have you broke that thing?’ I just laughed and said, I want to sing this, because humour is such an important thing for me in the music. She’s not apologising, she’s not particularly happy that he’s back in town, and she’s kind of giving him a hard time, and I like that. She’s being very ironic, and that’s so real and true.”

With only pianist Aaron Diehl remaining from the line-up of WomanChild, the tightly focused band sound, honed during an extended period of gigging and touring, features the rhythm section of bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Lawrence Leathers. “We’ve been on the road,” McLorin Salvant says, “and I really wanted it to be people that not only knew each other musically, but personally, who were friends who had been through things together, so there was a deep emotional connection.”

If the absence of James Chirillo in the lineup leaves banjo lovers distraught, there’s an encouraging silver lining. “The banjo is one of my favourite instruments, so I’ll always want a little bit of banjo. This time I decided I wanted to have one song in French with an accordion player [the melancholy song of lost love, ‘Le Mal De Vivre’]. For some reason, I like those instruments that for a long time had been mocked. Accordion and banjo: I love those instruments.”

Judging by the ear-catching, ever-changing backdrops created by Diehl, Sikivie and Leathers, the quartet is clearly pulling in one creative direction, as McLorin Salvant is quick to acknowledge.

“Sensitivity is key, and not getting in the way of the song’s meaning. As jazz musicians, when you’re improvising it’s easy to lose that core meaning of the song. Also, they’re swinging – that, I think, is crucial. It’s very joyful, and they’re people who feed me as much as I give back. And dynamics, too. I don’t think I’ve heard so many dynamics in another band. You realise it the most when you hear us live. That’s why I really want to do a live album with this band. They actually taught me the beauty and the effectiveness of dynamics, of having that range.”

But let’s not forget the most glorious instrument of all: McLorin Salvant’s voice. Listening to the way in which she endlessly sustains the first two words (‘Love appeared’) of album opener, ‘Fog’, you’re struck anew by the timbral richness and interpretative depth. Is she conscious of any changes in her voice since WomanChild?

“I’m more aware of what I can and can’t do. And I’m probably more aware of the value of certain textures for certain words. I can growl a little bit now, which I couldn’t necessarily do before. I think I still have a very young voice; I definitely can’t hit all the lows that I’d like. But I also feel like I have more endurance, that’s something I notice more on tour. I’m more aware of things so that I can make choices that are less driven by how pretty it sounds, and more driven by: what is the meaning of this? Why am I doing this? Can I do less? As I grow older, I’m realising more and more that I can do less – you’re doing too much, you’re sounding too much like somebody that’s not you, you’re pushing this for no reason, you’re trying to make a nice low sound there, why are you doing that?”

When it comes to other music that has been fuelling her creativity, McLorin Salvant’s overarching desire to continue soaking up the music of the greats who preceded her comes strongly to the fore.

“Right now, I’m getting back to some fundamental things that I sort of overlooked: the Gershwin Songbook. I went online and picked up this list of all their songs, whether together or separate. And, of course, there are some songs that we all know, but there are a lot of songs that haven’t been recorded. I discovered a great one called ‘Ask Me Again’ which has been recorded by Rosemary Clooney, Nancy LaMott, and Michael Feinstein, and that’s it. It’s a beautiful song, but there’s not really a pure jazz version, which is crazy because that song was written, I think, in the 1920s. Since the album’s been out, I’ve been listening to D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, and Choose Your Weapon by Hiatus Kaiyote, an amazing future soul band from Australia.” The venerably old in the embrace of the freshly minted. That, in a nutshell, seems to encapsulate what this exceptional artist is all about. 

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This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of Jazzwise. Subscribe to Jazzwise