Bio:
Cécile McLorin Salvant was born and raised in Miami, Florida of a French mother and a Haitian father. She started classical piano studies at 5, and began singing in a children’s choir at 8 years old. Early on, she developed an interest in classical voice.
In 2007, Cécile moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study law as well as classical and baroque voice at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory. It was in Aix-en-Provence, with reedist and teacher Jean-François Bonnel, that she started learning about jazz, and sang with her first band. In 2009, after a series of concerts in Paris, she recorded her first album "Cécile", with Jean-François Bonnel's Paris Quintet. A year later, she won the Thelonious Monk competition.
In 2014, her second album, WomanChild (Mack Avenue Records) was nominated for a Grammy.
Her third and fourth albums (For One To Love and Dreams and Daggers) both won Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
Cécile frequently makes music with Aaron Diehl, Paul Sikivie, Lawrence Leathers, Kyle Poole, and Sullivan Fortner. She has collaborated with Archie Shepp, Wynton Marsalis, John Clayton, Jeff Hamilton, Renee Rosnes, Bill Charlap, Fred Hersch, Jacky Terrasson, Darcy James Argue.
She sings vaudeville, country blues, broadway songs, rarities, and her own compositions. An audience member once described her as a “postmodern cabaret singer”.
She does some illustration and textile work, and is interested in the decorative arts.
Her latest album, released in fall of 2018, The Window, was recorded duo with Sullivan Fortner (piano), featuring Melissa Aldana (tenor saxophone).
Management/Booking:
MANAGEMENT
The Management Ark, Inc.
Edward C. Arrendell, II
3 Bethesda Metro Center
Suite 700
Bethesda, MD USA 20814 [email protected]
BOOKING
The Kurland Agency
Jamie Ziefert
173 Brighton Avenue
Boston, MA USA 02134-2003 [email protected]
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Ben Ratliff writes in The New York Times: “she sings clearly, with her full pitch range, from a pronounced low end to full and distinct high notes, used sparingly [...] Her voice clamps into each song, performing careful variations on pitch, stretching words but generally not scatting; her face conveys meaning, representing sorrow or serenity like a silent-movie actor.”
Fred Kaplan profiled Salvant in The New Yorker : "'Mad About the Boy' — if you just looked at the lyrics, you'd think this is really a song written by a crazy person. Or a song narrated by a crazy person. And she gets into that. It is a mad song."
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).