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Jazz Articles about Cecile McLorin Salvant

About Cecile McLorin Salvant

Album Review

Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension

Read "Dynamic Maximum Tension" reviewed by Katchie Cartwright

by Katchie Cartwright
September 3, 2023

Darcy James Argue's superb double-album Nonesuch debut offers compositions written throughout his career. He turns to twentieth-century thinkers for “ideas that can help us in the present, that we can reexamine and reconfigure for our own purposes." These include futurist designer Buckminster Fuller, cryptanalyst-computer scientist Alan Turing, composer-arranger Bob Brookmeyer, actress-screenwriter Mae West, trumpeter-mentor Laurie Frink, and musician-beyond-category Duke Ellington, among others. Like West, Argue seems to control his own path. He may not yet be the tycoon she was, ...

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Cécile McLorin Salvant: Mélusine

by Pedro Keul
July 7, 2023

Mélusine is a figure of European folklore, a female spirit of fresh water in a holy well or river. She is usually depicted as a woman who turns into a half-snake each Saturday as a result of a childhood curse by her mother. Not by coincidence, is also the name of the 2023 album (on Nonesuch Records) from Cécile McLorin Salvant, following Ghost Song, which has received two Grammy nominations and many mentions on the best albums of 2022 lists ...

Album Review

Ben Wendel: All One

Read "All One" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
June 7, 2023

Saxophonist Ben Wendel came up with a unique approach for this album of duets. He plays with a different musician on each of these six tracks, but while his guests stick to their primary instruments, Wendel fills in the space around them with multiple saxophone and bassoon parts, electronic effects, and percussion. The most conventional results of this approach are heard in the two vocal tracks. Cecile McLorin Salvant's sensitive singing on “I Loves You Porgy" and Jose ...

Album Review

Vince Mendoza/Metropole Orkest: Olympians

Read "Olympians" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 4, 2023

Eight-time Grammy-winning composer/arranger Vince Mendoza, born and raised in Norwalk, CT, has enjoyed great success overseas--in Europe, to be more precise--since releasing an album with Germany's WDR Big Band in 1994. The following year, Mendoza began collaborating with the Dutch Metropole Orkest and in 1998 was named its principal guest conductor. Olympians is Mendoza's third recording with the massive, string-laden Metropole. He has recorded other albums with the London and Czech Symphony Orchestras. Here in the U.S., ...

Album Review

Cecile McLorin Salvant: Mélusine

Read "Mélusine" reviewed by Katchie Cartwright

by Katchie Cartwright
March 30, 2023

Wynton Marsalis was right, Cécile McLorin Salvant is the sort of singer who comes along only “once in a generation or two." A MacArthur Fellow, multiple Grammy winner, and self-described eclectic, Salvant creates projects that encompass an astonishing array of idioms and historical periods, which she interrelates inventively and interweaves with original compositions. Here, she plumbs the francophone side of her repertoire. French songs have cropped up regularly in her live shows, but less on disk. Mélusine fills the gap ...

Album Review

Vince Mendoza Metropole Orkest: Olympians

Read "Olympians" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
March 16, 2023

Many years ago Dizzy Gillespie recorded an album called The New Continent (Limelight, 1965). Whether it was commercially successful is hard to say, but it featured an all-star cast of Los Angeles session players. The recording made a deep impression on some listeners because it was creative, dynamic, exotic and simply enjoyable. Good compositions (by Lalo Schifrin), arrangements and musicians will do that, even if the result is a bit different than mainstream jazz. Or mainstream Gillespie. ...

Radio & Podcasts

Pop Goes the Jazzbo

by Patrick Burnette
May 12, 2022

"Going Pop" can mean many different things where jazz musicians are concerned, from adding electricity (dang it, Miles, why you do that?), to covering pop songs, to actually experimenting with writing pop songs (not too many take this path and few emerge unscathed). And then there's rare jazzer combining jazz and pop songs, as you'll soon find out. This time out we look at approaches all over the spectrum, ending with a vocal album Mike has already pegged as an ...