Cécile Mclorin Salvant: Ghost Song
McLorin Salvant, vocals; Sullivan Fortner, piano, Fender Rhodes; Aaron Diehl, piano, pipe organ; Paul Sikivie, Burniss Travis, bass; Alexa Tarantino, flute; Marvin Sewell, guitar; James Chirillo, banjo; Keita Ogawa, percussion; Kyle Poole, drums; Daniel Swenberg, lute, theorbo; Brooklyn Youth Chorus.
Nonesuch (LP, CD). McLorin Salvant, prod.; Todd Whitelock, Patrick Dillet, Chris Muth, engs.
Performance *****
Sonics *****
Starting with her out-of-nowhere triumph at the 2010 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition and continuing with the release of four albums including three Grammy winners, Cécile McLorin Salvant, still just 32, has been raising eyebrows and neck hairs for a dozen years. She reigns as the supreme jazz singer of our time, ranking among the best of all time. More remarkable, she keeps getting better, and, rarer still, she keeps evolving, expanding her repertoire of styles—which was vast from the start—without losing a wisp of her deep blues, swing, precision, wit, operatic range, or storytelling drama.
Ghost Song, her debut on Nonesuch, is unlike anything she’s recorded. It contains no jazz standards. It begins with a gorgeous a cappella, which sounds like Hildegard of Bingen and segues into Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” follows with a medley of “Optimistic Voices” from The Wizard of Oz and Gregory Porter’s “No Love Dying,” then veers into the album’s title tune, a song of her own composition about failed love, then a witty ditty on the annoying obligations of romance (another original, which evokes the spirits of Nöel Coward and Dorothy Parker), and ends Side 1 with Sting’s “Until.”
Side 2 begins with an original called “I Lost My Mind” (overdubs of her voice backed by eerie pipe organ), moves to “Moon Song,” another original of pining love; “The World Is Mean,” from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera; “Dead Poplar,” a ballad set to the text of a love letter from Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keeffe; climaxed by another original, “Thunderclouds,” a song of unhesitant, unbridled love, which, after the ambivalence and anguish of the previous songs, feels like a break in a storm.
But then comes the coda, a traditional folk ballad, “Unquiet Grave,” about a man mourning the loss of his beloved and the buried woman who is troubled by his melancholy and seeks peace in the beyond. Salvant sings it a cappella—as she sang “Wuthering Heights” at the album’s beginning—against the natural echo of St. Malachy’s Church in Times Square, on an uneasily quiet day with no traffic noise heard outside, amid the pandemic’s lockdown.
This is an album to listen to, riveted, as an album, not a mere collection of songs. It’s like watching a cabaret act or gazing through a musical scrapbook that documents the scattered moods of a particular time. Kurt Weill is clearly an inspiration here, not merely the composer of one track. Salvant told me that she’d been listening to his music a fair amount, attracted to his “acerbic humor,” his “fatalism with a wink and a laugh and a wistful social commentary.” Her rendition on Dreams and Daggers of Weill’s heartbreaking “Somehow I Never Could Believe,” from his opera Street Scene, was the first sign that Salvant could sculpt a story, a whole play, from a lyric—that she could be a great musical actress if she wanted to be. On Ghost Song, she extends this art through the winding voyage of an entire album.
Six of the 12 tracks are composed by Salvant. She wrote a few originals for her first two works, WomanChild and For One to Love, but they didn’t measure up to the albums’ standards. Her originals on Ghost Song very much do measure up. These are works of poetry, with striking images and stirring arrangements.
Those arrangements vary in size: duets with piano, pipe organ, or bass; trios, both standard (piano-bass-drums) and unusual (piano-flute-banjo); quartets with guitar and percussion—all played by musicians she’s worked with before, augmented, on one song, by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. (Because of the pandemic, each of the choir’s 27 singers sent in a home-recorded file, which Salvant’s longtime engineer, Todd Whitelock, seamlessly wove together.)
The sound in general, on vinyl and digital, is superb, recorded in 24/96 digital—mainly at Brooklyn’s Bunker Studio, renowned for its fine piano and vintage mikes—and mixed on a Neve 8088 analog console. The album sounds warmer than usual but also crisp and detailed, an effect pulled off with a deft combination of mikes—tubes (a Neuman U47 on her voice), condensers, and ribbons. There is no EQ or other artificial additives. On the church tracks, the reverb is natural, not electronic.—Fred Kaplan
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