Cécile McLorin Salvant's Ogresse At Carnegie Hall

Cécile McLorin Salvant
Carnegie Hall
Ogresse
New York, NY
May 21, 2025

The relationship between jazz and classical music has a long, complicated history. Musicians themselves tend to care more about the music than concepts of genre, and you only need to listen to the echoes of French Impressionism in the opening moments of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959), or to Art Farmer and Jim Hall's adaptation of Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess" to understand the aesthetic cross-pollination at work.

And the classical music establishment to varying degrees welcomed jazz musicians into their concert halls. Norman Granz's wildly successful "Jazz at the Philharmonic" series brought jazz into prestigious venues such as Los Angeles' Philharmonic Auditorium, Boston's Symphony Hall , Chicago's Civic Opera House and New York's Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Hall itself hosted a staggering roster of jazz artists from the '40s through the '70s, notably including the premiere of Duke Ellington's first foray into classical form, the orchestral suite Black, Brown, and Beige.

Ellington was one of a number of jazz composers, including Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and John Lewis to write in traditionally classical forms: especially symphonic music, but also the suite, theme and variations, and sonata form. This was sincere artistic exploration—none of these pieces are gimmicks—but also served as a bid to be viewed as serious art in the decades before jazz became its own establishment and was branded America's classical music.

Vocal music, however, is conspicuously absent from this history of exchange. In his later years, Ellington began but never completed an opera titled Queenie Pie, and his sacred concerts include some choral passages. Mary Lou Williams' Mary Lou's Mass (Sony Urban Music, 1975) incorporates small-vocal-ensemble settings of English translations of certain portions of the Catholic mass, and Vince Guaraldi composed a fairly traditionally-structured mass, recorded live in 1965 with a full choir and later released as the album At Grace Cathedral (Fantasy, 1975). Until recently, that was about as far as jazz composers seemed interested in going.

The 21st century has brought some serious attempts to merge with and or borrow from classical vocal forms. Terrence Blanchard has written two operas, most notably Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which premiered in 2019 at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis and subsequently opened the 2021-22 season at the Metropolitan Opera. Also in 2021, Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding premiered their opera Iphigenia at ArtsEmerson in Boston, before bringing it to The Kennedy Center and multiple venues in California. These two productions have very different relationships to their medium; one attempts to integrate itself into operatic convention, and the other aims to disrupt it. But they represent an opening gesture towards claiming opera as a legitimate vehicle for jazz composition.

Then there is Cecile McLorin Salvant's monodrama Ogresse, a hybrid of cantata, classical song cycle and musical theater, which is more formally ambiguous (and in certain ways ambitious) than its operatic peers. Ogresse premiered in an early form at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018, and has since been performed at The Kennedy Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and on international tour. In; May, Salvant brought it to Carnegie Hall's Zankel Auditorium for the final show in her "Perspectives Series" residency of the 2024-25 season. In this current rendition it is a densely-allegorical narrative song cycle, backed by a unique chamber ensemble playing Darcy James Argue's beautifully constructed arrangements, and performed against the background of a video projection by Belgian animator Lia Bertels, who is working with Salvant to produce an animated film of the piece.

The story, which along with the music and the tenderly poetic libretto was written by Salvant, has a fairly straightforward folkloric structure, adorned with unexpected imagery and symbolic nuance. A monster, the titular ogresse, lives in the woods on the outskirts of a town. Before the events of the story, a band of villagers had gone into the woods to capture her, with the intention of displaying her in a sideshow. Instead, she ate them, all but the one man who escaped to warn the townspeople of the "black beast in the woods." "Despite this," Salvant sings, "she was happy, she was free, like the breeze." In the narrative present, a village girl named Lily (who is quite literally lily-white: "what is it about a white woman that does me in so?") wanders off to explore nature, defying her father's imperious instructions that "a girl alone cannot be free / a girl alone, calamity" and wandering farther afield gets lost in the woods. There she is spotted by the ogresse, who is captivated by this strange, delicate creature:

"The ogresse was beguiled
by the curious porcelain child
tenderly singing a prayer.
The ogresse's hunger was singing as well,
the ogresse's belly was ringing a bell."

The ogresse succumbs to her temptation and eats this rare delicacy. Meanwhile, the townspeople go looking for the runaway Lily, and finding her shoes by the border between fields and woods, where she had kicked them off, jump to the nevertheless accurate conclusion that she has been eaten by the monster living in the woods. As Salvant sings, "the ogresse did what they knew she would.'"

One man sees opportunity in this chaos and grief, to "sell them the head of the beast that they wait for." Knowing that he is not the strongest or bravest of men, he decides that instead of trying to attack "the beast" with force he will seduce her, and then kill her once, having fallen in love with him, her guard is down. He comes, prostrate, to the place where she lives in the woods, and appeals to her insecurity and isolation, showering her with praise. Despite her initial responses of "I do not believe you. Why should I believe you?" he continues to return, each time protesting that he is unarmed and professing his desire to be with her. Though the forest itself tries to warn her ("Trees were dying, birds were crying. They whispered together, 'the man is lying'") eventually her skepticism softens, and she begins to fall for him.

One evening, as their romance buds, they come across an abandoned church while walking through the woods. In the score's musical high point, which immediately precedes the narrative climax, they dance together in the graveyard, and the ogresse reflects on and laments her bloody past in the context of her new present:

"I took a thousand lives.
I hunted night and day, almost guiltlessly.
I swallowed them so they could fill all this nothing.
And now I'm worn and tired and empty,
and gone like the urge, far gone.
Sometimes I dream of them.
Somehow their spirits seem to float on the wind.
I try to hide until I turn into nothing.
I wonder if I'll ever find a way to live
with all this blood on my hands.
Maybe we could dance all night
under clouds of violet,
moving to melodies long forgotten.
Maybe if you held me tight enough, my love,
neither one of us would fly or fall.
We would dance to the memory of all the people
lost to the belly of the big black beast that I was,
the big black beast that I fear in me."

The next day, a one-eyed robin takes the ogresse down to the banks of the river to show her the dagger which her lover has stashed away. Repeating nature's earlier warning, the robin cries primally, over and over, "the man is lying." At the same time, that man realizes that he has genuinely fallen for the ogresse. He decides that he will abandon his scheme and former life both to be with her, that he will throw his hidden dagger into the river and follow his newfound love.

That evening, the ogresse hides by the river, and watches him go straight to the dagger's hiding place. Revealing herself, she accuses him of his duplicity. He tries to explain the change he has undergone:

"Love is a strange deception.
I thought I came for blood,
but love opened the door,
giving me more than
what I had bargained for.
Love is a strange
change in perception.
Love is a strange
change in the way
the wind blows. Who cares
where the wind may go.
I go where you go."

But the ogresse, wounded by his lies, refuses his explanation. Her earlier motif returns, expanded and accompanied by baroque organ:

"I do not believe you.
Why should I believe you?
How could I believe
that anyone would come to me
for anything but money or blood?
I opened my heart for you,
gave everything up for you.
How could I behave so recklessly?
There's only one to blame, it's me.
You poisoned me with your words, you lying snake.
Now I've taken all I can possibly take.
My rage is a forest fire, my rage is a forest fire.

In classic tragic fashion, the ogresse poisons her lover and then eats his body, dying along with him. Salvant sings, "they traveled together to that undiscovered country from which no one ever returns." As they die, the forest is literally consumed by the metaphorical fire of the ogresse's despair and love. A year later, the villagers venture into the forest to survey the fire's damage, but, reaching the ogresse's territory, find "a great hill covered in flowers, a great hill covered in snakes."

Ogresse takes inspiration from a range of folklore, perhaps most conspicuously from the European tales that canonized the archetypal man-eating ogre. But while there are female ogres in that tradition, in creating a female antihero Salvant draws on more potent sources. The ogresse's treatment as an otherized grotesquery by the human characters is informed by the history of Sarah Baartman (the 19th Century's coercively-controlled sideshow attraction known as the "Hottentot Venus"), and the characterization of her simultaneously material and wild femininity is drawn from Salvant's reading of Vodou goddess Erzulie Fréda Dahomey.

It is in these contexts that Ogresse thematically centers a woman of color's hunger, loneliness, anger, longing and self-image; depicting her as at once monstrous, divine and utterly human. And the fundamental humanity of her character is the central theme of the piece. From its earliest minutes, her violent nature is presented not as the intrinsic trait of a monster, but a response to early-life trauma. As she describes her childhood:

"Father had flown away sometime ago.
My face was all he left behind,
and soon he left my mother's mind.
She remarried a shadow.
The shadow overtook our home.
The shadow swallowed mother whole;
soon she was a shadow too.
The shadow tried to put me in his mouth.
He opened wide, I opened wider.
I bit his head off, and then I fled
off to these woods waiting for consequence,
with a shadow in my belly that tells me what to do."

Ogresse is ultimately asking us to consider what monstrosity actually is, and to reflect on our own responsibility for perpetuating cycles of violence through our inability or unwillingness to see all other people as fully realized selves, every bit as deserving of empathy, grace, value, and love as we ourselves wish, in our gentlest and most vulnerable moments, to be.

A defining characteristic of Ogresse is its musical heterogeneity. The score jumps between genres, for the most part preferring contrast to fusion: from big-band swing to banjo-and-fiddle Americana, from jazz ballad to operatic melodrama. An inveterate musical polyglot, Salvant draws not just from jazz traditions but also from bluegrass, musical theater and baroque opera. But no matter what style she is writing in, there is a consistent prioritization of melody. From the catchy swing of "She's Big," which sets up the relation of the townspeople towards the ogresse, to the aforementioned graveyard dance and the tender, soaring strains of its waltz, the listener is gifted an abundance of compelling melody.

Ogresse's aesthetic variety is not mere postmodern fusion, but serves a structural narrative purpose. Genre functions as a differentiator of character, an indicator of interior state, and a meta-storytelling device. Early in the show, Lily reflects on her restricted existence as a woman under the regime of her overprotective father and the music ("Maybe today's the day...") is a lilting "walking ballad" that has more in common with the ogresse's solo tunes than Lily's other musical settings. There is a brief musical theater-esque orchestrated interlude as she decides to go for a walk to explore the world while her father is away, and when she heads off on her own, she is accompanied by a lone banjo. Once she reaches the woods and commits to "take a dip in the wild," the banjo is joined by bass, percussion, fiddle quartet and swells of woodwinds, coming together in a rollicking bluegrass two-step.

Not only does genre serve to articulate the interior state of characters, but also to mediate the interactions between them. When the townsman comes to woo the ogresse, his song "You're beautiful; has anyone told you you're beautiful as you are?" abandons the Americana of his earlier soliloquy to affect an upbeat, syncopated jazz feel, dominated by vibraphone, bass, and horns. However, the ogresse does not meet him in her usual swinging mode, but instead expresses her distrust ("I do not believe you; why should I believe you?") in a minor-key Baroque lament featuring organ and string quartet. As he continues to try to woo her, they trade back and forth between these disparate musical spaces, until her caution starts to soften under his proclamations. Her final declaration of disbelief preserves her previous minor-key melody, but underneath it is the syncopated accompaniment from his courtship.

All this sophisticated musical-narrative interplay is a result not only of Salvant's exceptional compositions, but also of Argue's elegant arrangements that manage to integrate elements of jazz, contemporary classical and modern musical theater orchestration. He is bolstered in this effort by a superb ensemble* that is carefully constructed to allow for Ogresse's wide-ranging musical aspirations. There are canny doubling choices (guitar with banjo, piano with baroque organ and melodica) as well as unconventional choices for a medium-sized jazz ensemble, including horn, oboe, tuba and string quartet—instrumentation that Argue permutes into a striking array of colors and textures. And despite the regimented, programmatic nature of the music, there is space throughout for almost all of these master musicians to improvise. That fundamental component of jazz is not lost, even to the vast scope of Ogresse's aspirations.

Of course, it's Salvant's vocal ability, interpretive choices and sheer stylistic range that enable all these ambitious choices to come together. She lends the piece its operatic depth and its jazzy fluidity. Her voice shifts and transmutes from character to character, from line to line. She is constantly in motion: making deft timbral shifts from deep, rich contralto to delicate, ethereal soprano; employing vocal colors that range from huge unconstrained vibrato, to coy mousy straight tone, to musical theater declamation, to strident threnodic wail, to nimble baroque ornamentation. There is perhaps no more capable instrument in contemporary popular singing than Salvant's, and a piece of this breadth and nuance could very possibly have been sung by no one but her.

Despite the remarkable achievement of this music, it can currently only be experienced in infrequent live performance. This is particularly notable as Salvant, Argue, and the orchestra have already recorded it in studio. Though there has been no public explanation for holding onto the recording, it may be that the release is being delayed to coincide with the animated film mentioned above, which is still in production.

This performance of Ogresse was set in front of a projection of a series of dynamically shifting animated stills, which while far from a complete film, appears to have been constructed from pieces of that ongoing project. In it, Bertels employs a striking style of animation: layered blocks of saturated, often-unnatural colors, hand drawn but overtly digital, all coming together to an oddly organic result, the electronic echo of a linocut print. Her use of line in particular, with its deliberately imprecise curves, has commonalities with Salvant's own visual art. (She makes embroidery and works on paper, and last year exhibited pieces from both practices at Picture Room in Brooklyn.)

The video, even in its current form, was in meaningful dialogue with the music and libretto. Importantly, it situates this apparently conventional folktale in a relatively contemporary setting. The town is depicted with streetlamps and a factory with smokestacks. The ogresse herself lives in a modernist glass house in the woods: interior scenes include a cat clock, telephone, pink refrigerator, and checkerboard tile floor (also a kitchen island dripping with Lily's blood).

Beyond scene-setting and contextualization, the animation is filled with expressive gestures that enhance the musical and textual content of the piece. In that emotionally charged dance scene, the church, graveyard, trees and even hills beyond it are rendered in a neon technicolor that feels dreamlike and somewhat supernatural. Not long after, when the robin is warning the ogresse, we see blood-red rain falling from the sky and dripping from the trees of the forest as though from wounds. While it is hard to say what the final film will look like, or even whether a change from this basic concept to a more fluid animation will be a benefit or hindrance, the visual element is a vital component of the piece, substituting at least in part for the absence of set and staging.

Ogresse is an immensely successful venture into conventionally classical approaches to staged vocal music, but that may be the least of its successes. It is also a touching fable about otherness, a vibrantly multi-disciplinary work and simply an exceptional composition. Most of all, it is a magnum opus for Salvant, a display of the sheer scale of her artistic capacities. We are lucky indeed that she has brought it into being.

Ensemble Members

Helen Sung: piano, organ, and melodica; Josh Roseman: trombone and tuba; Ted Nash: woodwinds ; Warren Wolf: vibraphone and marimba; Brandon Seabrook: guitar and banjo; Tom Christensen: horn; Kirk Knuffke: trumpet; David Wong: bass; Samuel Torres: percussion; Olivia De Prato: violin; Ludovica Burtone: violin; Victor Lowrie: viola; Nathan Watts: cello.

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