Cecile McLorin Salvant: Oh Snap

It feels like Cecile McLorin Salvant is just showing off. The 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant Award Winner follows up Ghost Song (Nonesuch, 2022) and Mélusine (Nonesuch, 2023) with Oh Snap, a post-genre effort with deeply personal lyrics that sound like they were lifted from the diaries of a rediscovered poet.

McLorin recorded Oh Snap alone, learning GarageBand and AutoTune as she went. She said, "I felt I had lost a connection to music because it was something that I felt I should do in a certain way... I thought, what would I build if I could just build it alone, based on who I am?"

Oh Snap begins with McLorin Salvant singing "I want to be a river, but I am a volcano." Like many songs on the album, the vocals in "I am a volcano" are layered amidst electronic instruments and effects. "Take this stone" has a campfire vibe. She sings, "take this stone and pass it on, it alters with each handling... but it will not erode." Kate Davis and June McDoom add vocal harmonies.

"What does blue mean to you?" references Thelonious Monk in a Toni Morrison-inspired prose poem. This is followed by an a cappella fragment of The Commodores' 1977 funk classic, "Brick House," that sounds like it was recorded with some friends after a couple of glasses of wine. The title track (below) uses Indian (the subcontinent, not Native Americans) vocal patterns against complex, machine-generated rhythmic patterns. McLorin Salvant said, "I had a very, very specific sound for the vocal that I got through tinkering with these GarageBand and Logic effects and vocal reverbs and things like that . . . I am more willing to mess with my voice and make it sound messier and crazier and less clear."

Her voice is a chameleon in Oh Snap's 13 tracks, swinging from a girlish, Blossom Dearie ("Take this stone") to traditional jazz ("What does blue mean to you?" and "Expanse"), from AutoTune-heavy house ("A little bit more") to a hybrid, avant-garde, sacred, world music featuring Japanese percussionist Keita Ogawa ("A frog jumps in").

Cécile McLorin Salvant is that absurdly smart, ridiculously talented friend who aces all the tests but never studies, drives you to the audition but gets the part, and sells her vacation photos to a gallery. It may seem like showing off to us mortals, but she is just being herself. Life's blessings are not distributed equally. That is just how it is.

Oh Snap is the latest chapter in McLorin Salvant's artistic story. It is unexpected and marvelous.

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