Après le déluge: Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Radiant Performance at Little Island

It was a night when the rain fell hard, the music gathered force, and the shared experience became magical. That was the scene on Sunday, August 16, 2026 at Little Island, where Cecile McLorin Salvant and her quartet performed beneath steadily darkening skies.

Salvant is perhaps the greatest jazz singer of her generation. She possesses an extraordinary voice, complete command of her instrument, and the ability to elevate almost any material into high art. She is both a brilliant interpreter and a masterful composer. Salvant is also a superb entertainer—remarkably expressive, dramatically compelling, and able to use humor to great effect. She is the recipient of a formidable collection of honors, including three Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album, repeated victories in the DownBeat Critics Poll, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her frequent collaborator Sullivan Fortner is himself a three-time Grammy winner and placed highly in DownBeat polls.

Little Island is a beautifully designed park on Pier 55 in the Hudson River in New York City. Its lovely amphitheater has approximately 700 seats overlooking the river, with boats passing in the background. Salvant performed there on two nights that were billed as the music of Tin Pan Alley, but she switched things up and presented a very different program on Sunday.

Rain had been threatening for some time, and a light drizzle began shortly before showtime and continued intermittently. About 50 minutes into the performance, however, the skies opened up. That did not dampen the audience's enthusiasm in the least. Surprisingly few people left before the end of the concert. Salvant embraced the challenge and put on a splendid show. Her group included Fortner on keyboards, Paul Sikivie on bass, and Kyle Poole on drums. Sikivie has worked with her since 2012, and Poole has been a member of her touring ensembles since at least 2017. The musicians performed beneath a small canopy, which meant that Fortner could not use the baby grand piano as he had the night before, and Sikivie elected to stick to electric bass rather than play upright bass to conserve space.

The intermittent rain also made photography challenging. I was reluctant to expose my camera to the weather, but there were enough stretches when the rain stopped or eased to a light drizzle for me to continue shooting. Fog reduced the passing boats to murky silhouettes, while raindrops on my lens gave some of the resulting images an eerie, diffuse quality. The weather also created unusual photographic opportunities. Salvant repeatedly stepped out from beneath the canopy to be closer to the crowd, umbrella in hand, and the resulting photographs were among the evening's most distinctive and compelling images. She made light of the rain, treating the downpour as an unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome part of the performance rather than an obstacle to it. There were many humorous moments, and her response to it invited the audience not merely to endure the downpour but to embrace it with her. I relished the opportunity both to experience the performance and to capture some special moments.

The set opened with "Obsession," Brazilian composer Dori Caymmi's darkly romantic song that Salvant and Fortner had previously recorded on The Window (Mack Avenue Records, 2018). The program moved seamlessly across genres. The quartet next played "With Every Breath I Take," the Cy Coleman and David Zippel ballad from City of Angels that became the title track of Salvant's contemporaneous orchestral album. "Second Guessing," from Oh Snap (Nonesuch Records, 2025), a poignant, soulful pop song, followed.

Another highlight was "Take This Stone," a gorgeous, musically uplifting folk-country ballad from Oh Snap. The recorded version features acoustic guitar played by Evan Wright, with June McDoom and Kate Davis singing harmony vocals. Fortner deftly evoked the sound of a flamenco guitar on his keyboard, sang a verse in a surprisingly expressive voice and also dueted with Salvant to great effect. The performance demonstrated the extraordinary musical rapport between Salvant and Fortner that was an essential part of the performance.

The remainder of the program illustrated the immense range of Salvant"s repertoire. One of its most extraordinary moments was "Puro Teatro," the classic bolero written by Puerto Rican composer Tite Curet Alonso . Salvant sang convincingly in Spanish, supported by the group's distinctly old-school Cuban rhythmic sound. She also performed the moody, waltz-like "Until," a lesser-known Sting song written for the 2001 film Kate & Leopold. Salvant has a longstanding love of Baroque music, and sang Antoine Boësset's "Objet dont les charmes si doux," a French chanson composed for voice and lute in 1643.

After more than an hour, the rain was coming down hard, and the set had to end. It concluded with an exuberant rendition of Donna Summer's synth-pop disco hit "I Feel Love." It came as quite a surprise to me, but it was just a perfect ending. In Salvant's hands, a set encompassing her own contemporary compositions, a 17th-century court song, a Broadway ballad, a Caribbean bolero, contemporary folk, and electronic disco came together beautifully. All of it found a natural place within her uniquely imaginative musical world. She drew the audience into what became an intimate shared experience for an incongruously magnificent evening. I went home soaked to the bone, but grateful to have been there.