“Cécile McLorin Salvant has the type of voice that could lead a singer to stop trying, and the fact that she hasn’t — that she’s only working and thinking harder — demonstrates just what a talent she really is.” — Los Angeles Times

Cécile McLorin Salvant is a composer, singer and visual artist. The late opera singer Jessye Norman described Salvant as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality which light up every note she sings.” Salvant is an eclectic curator, unearthing connections among vaudeville, blues, global folk traditions, theater, jazz and baroque music. Salvant won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010. She received Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for three consecutive albums and garnered a MacArthur Fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award.

Ghost Song, Salvant’s Nonesuch Records debut, explores the (many) ways people can be haunted — by lingering memories, roads not taken and ghosts real and imagined. Its disquietingly evocative songs follow living souls as they confront torments of absence — some characters lament loved ones gone too soon, others are troubled by the remnants of vanished romance and still others are paralyzed by the sense of time galloping past. Nothing Salvant has done can quite prepare listeners for the visceral intensity and genre-obliterating atmospheres of Ghost Song. The work draws on the tools she has used in the past, but in new and harrowing ways. It is the rare departure that is also an arrival.

Funds provided by the Ginny Mancini Endowment for Vocal Performance.