When the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant was profiled in The New Yorker, Wynton Marsalis described her as the kind of talent who comes along only “once in a generation or two.” Salvant’s work is rooted in jazz—in the tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Abbey Lincoln—and she has won three Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album. But her interests and her repertoire reach across eras and continents. She studied Baroque music and jazz at conservatory, and performs songs in French, Occitan, and Haitian Kreyòl. “I think I have the spirit of a kind of a radio d.j. slash curator,” she tells David Remnick. “It’s almost like making a mixtape for someone and only putting deep cuts.” And even when singing the standards, she aims “to find the gems that haven’t been sung and sung and sung over and over again.” During a summer tour, she visited the studio at WNYC to perform “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” made famous by Barbra Streisand; “Can She Excuse My Wrongs,” by John Dowland, the English composer of the Elizabethan era; and “Moon Song,” an original from Salvant’s album “Ghost Song.”This segment originally aired on May 31, 2024.
Who is Cécile McLorin Salvant?
We were listening to folk music, some bluegrass. I could go on and on, actually. A lot of Brazilian music.
And that's all due to your mother.
She has a huge, wide ear and she traveled a lot in her childhood. And I think she brought back those travels in some way or that traveling sort of feeling.
Where did she grow up?
She grew up in Tunisia. She lived throughout Africa. She lived in Senegal. She lived in Cuba. She lived in Dominican Republic. She lived in Honduras, in Haiti.
And what was the lingua franca at home, English, French, or both?
Franca. It was franca. It was French. It was French at home.
Yeah. From what I understand, in fact, from a profile in The New Yorker some years ago, there was a time when you were a kid, you thought you were going to study law.
Not so much when I was a kid. It was more after high school. I really didn't know what to do. And there was this political science prep school in this small town in France. My cousin was going. They had a law option, like first year law.
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