Twenty-four year old jazz singer Cecile McLorin Salvant is passionate about the early days of jazz—not just the standards she so skillfully reinterprets, but also the playful spirit of early jazz. When she sings, she twists her mouth and contorts her voice, tweaking her diction and intonation.
Though she rightfully gets compared to greats like Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, the New York-based singer also receives inspiration from Louie Armstrong, whose experimental approach to jazz singing blurred the line between vocalist and instrument. Her latest album, Womanchild, also shows off her writing skills, with a couple originals along with the standards.
Salvant performs at Catalina Bar & Grill on Sunset Blvd. on February 17. We spoke with her about her new album and her jazz upbringing.
You moved to France to study classical music, but it was there that you discovered jazz, right?
Sort of. I moved to France after high school because I had no idea what I wanted to study and where I wanted to go for college. I signed up for a political science French school and classical voice lessons at the conservatory. I had heard some jazz at home because my mom likes some of the great jazz singers.
When I moved to France and I went to the conservatory, I met the jazz teacher. He really encouraged me to audition for the program and later on pursue jazz as a career. A big thing for me was recording the first album with my teacher and a Parisian band. That helped me to tour France. Then winning the Thelonius Monk competition in 2010 just kind of put things in the next gear. It especially got me out of just the French network and I started to work with American musicians and eventually moved back to the United States.
You sing a lot of old jazz tunes. What do you like about early jazz?
I really like to go way back in time and check things out. There’s something about music and development—music at its start. That really interests me in that there’s this raw, fresh quality to it. There’s a warmth, and everything’s not perfect. Things are so unexpected, it’s kind of this spontaneous thing. That to me is really interesting. I think the music from the 1920s and from the teens and earlier, it’s definitely music that is very steeped in folk music. You can feel the folk elements of jazz in that. I love folk music. And I love the warmth of that sound.
I’m curious about your jump into writing original material for Womanchild. Was there a reason you decided to make the leap into writing?
I remember starting out thinking, “I’m not going to be a writer. Everyone’s a songwriter.” Sometimes I feel like people do too much and they’re not that good at any one thing. I thought, “I can really just work on this interpreting thing and leave the writing to people that actually are actually working on that craft.”
I kind of let it go for a while and I started listening to Betty Carter and Abby Lincoln and those were jazz singers and amazing interpreters of songs who also had a great amazing repertoire of songs that they wrote that kind of talked about their struggles and their view. After hearing Abby Lincoln’s songs, there was something very simple about them, and very profound. I thought, “Well maybe let me try this and see how it goes.”
“Womanchild” is definitely the first song that I ever wrote that I was happy with and didn’t want to throw away. There’s something really exciting about that first song and the first time you share it with somebody, and they don’t tell you that they hate it. And when you really have no experience and nobody’s taught you anything, you’re kind of just learning on the job and it’s something really fun.
The song Womanchild is interesting because it’s about finding a balance between your adult side and your inner child. Is that a major aspect of your personality?
A lot of people think I’m older than I seem. I get the old soul thing sometimes. On the other hand, I’m very childish. I’m very much in need of help and kind of lost in this world. I think about my grandma at my age. She probably was not as adolescent as I am, and as I probably will be for the next 10 years.
Sometimes when you write something, it becomes something else. I started thinking about art and my favorite art has two aspects: Something very mature and also something very naïve. To have that openness as a child, but also that developed keen intellectual sense of an adult. I love Thelonius Monk’s work and I think there’s a little bit of that in his music. I thought the same thing about jazz as a woman-child. It’s the ultimate music where it’s very instinctive, like “Let’s just play what comes out of our heads.” But also this very developed intellectual savant, like I’m working 12 hours a day trying to learn music theory and very complicated concepts in this very spontaneous, almost playful music. It became different things as time went on and I started thinking about it more and more.
Cecile McLorin Salvant performs at Catalina Bar & Grill on Sunset Blvd. on February 17. Tickets are $30 and the show starts at 8:30pm.
