Cecile McLorin Salvant at Carnegie Hall

Cecile McLorin Salvant
Carnegie Hall
"With Every Breath I Take"
New York City
March 27, 2025

"I'm nervous, so these are already a little clammy," announced Cecile McLorin Salvant as she removed her magenta gloves—part of a characteristically soigné outfit—early in her Carnegie Hall concert on Thursday.

Jitters are understandable when playing the Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall, the biggest space at arguably the world's most famous venue. And it is doubly the case if you are a singer whose approach is as intimate as Salvant's—stylistically, she is as close to cabaret as to jazz. Also, plenty of company joined her on stage. Rather than the trio or lone piano she often favors for accompaniment, Salvant was backed by a 40-piece orchestra, The Knights. And the arrangements were by Darcy James Argue, whose big band, Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, tends to a dense, layered sound.

But it all worked brilliantly. Salvant was anything but overshadowed by the venue or the stage full of accompanists. Her 100-minute performance effortlessly conquered the crowd —and the 2,790-seat space—and she soon settled into an easy confidence, spiced by a little self-deprecating humor.

It helped that the show was cannily designed, beginning with its emphasis on ballads, which Argue placed within sensitive and often restrained arrangements. Early on, for example, came "Lush Life," the Billy Strayhorn standard that exudes tragic romanticism. Its high emotions could have triggered a tsunami of strings. Yet Argue had McLorin Salvant and her quartet—of pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist David Wong and drummer Kush Abadey—play unadorned until near the end of the song. Only then did the orchestra's strings rise, quietly, to add poignancy to the tortured final lyrics: "And there I'll be/While I rot with the rest/Of those whose lives are lonely, too/ Lush life."

In the cabaret tradition, Salvant's song selection drew from multiple genres, and she applied her distinctive interpretative approach evenly to each. Whether singing Bacharach and David (a heart-stopping "Alfie," with Fortner alone, as her first encore), or Kurt Weill (a densely orchestrated "Barbara's Song'), Salvant's interpretations were not really jazz-infused, in contrast to many other jazz singers when they cross genres. Eschewing vocal pyrotechnics, Salvant sang unfussily, favoring precise and thoughtful phrasing that illuminated the lyrics and deepened their meaning.

During a stripped-down arrangement of Paul Simon's "American Tune," for example, she reinforced the current resonance of the lyric with her forlorn singing of lines like "And high up above my eyes could clearly see/The Statue of Liberty/Sailing away to sea." Mandolinist (and fellow genre-hopper) Chris Thile, wove lovely Americana solo licks through the song. (Thile also joined Salvant for several other selections, including a vocal duet on the Western-swing-flavored "The World is Mean.")

Salvant stretched musically in other ways. The bilingual daughter of a French mother and Haitian father, she sang Michel Legrand's tender "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" from the film of the same name, in the original French, and flawlessly pronounced some other French words that cropped up here and there in other songs. (The word "distingué" in the "Lush Life" lyrics has surely never sounded as elegant, at least when performed on this side of the Atlantic.) Salvant also penned the program's sole original, the ballad "Left Over," and even took to the piano to play it as she sang.

The singer will take a further leap in the final concert of her four-event Carnegie residency, on May 21st. (Quartet and duo performances in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall preceded the orchestra show.) With Argue again providing arrangements, Salvant will revive her 2019 work "Ogresse," for which she wrote the music and libretto and designed the theatrical costumes.

Oh, and Salvant is a visual artist, too, and is represented by a New York gallery. At 35, this polymath—with multiple Grammys and a McArthur Foundation "genius award" already under her belt—continues to grow more formidable by the year—or even, to paraphrase the title of Thursday's show, with every breath she takes.

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