Chris Randall photo
Cécile McLorin Salvant
Yale Schwarzman Center
New Haven
Jan. 25, 2025
Cécile McLorin Salvant, perhaps the jazz vocalist of the last decade, performed in New Haven Saturday in what she described as an evening of “pure fantasy.”
Salvant, who has a degree in classical baroque voice as well as in law, and who also works as a visual artist and as a musical archivist, once said that she took up jazz because she hoped it might be “a good hobby.”
Since taking it up, Salvant has released six albums (which earned her six Grammy nominations and three Grammys), been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (what the Foundation prefers not to call a “genius grant,” though it may be a fitting descriptor in this case), and has performed on every venerated stage in America, including at the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Village Vanguard, and this year, at Carnegie Hall, where Salvant is halfway through a four-concert residency.
On Saturday at Yale’s Schwarzman Center, Salvant stepped onto a temporarily-constructed stage in “Commons” dining hall, which had been transformed into a performance venue through a multi-day effort that required clearing the usual tables and condiment stations and replacing them with floor-to-ceiling curtains and risers seating approximately 400. (“My dream is to go to Yale,” Salvant remarked early in the set. “I want to have a backpack in the cafeteria. Is there a cafeteria?” To which the crowd replied, “You’re in it!”)
Although it was hard to evaluate the suggestion of Rachel Fine, executive director of the Schwarzman Center, that “these acoustics rival Carnegie Hall,” the space did lend itself to an intimate event, and to an exclusive one: The performance was free and open to the public, but the seats were quickly filled by invited guests and those with a careful eye on the website. Based on student accounts and the line snaking around Schwarzman’s rotunda, the wait list was substantial.
Almost as soon as she took the stage, Salvant pulled the microphone off its stand and held it as she walked in small circles around the ensemble, or occasionally, out beyond the stage lights entirely, so that for a few moments she became just a silhouette against the back lights.
Salvant was accompanied by pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole. With an emphasis on melody and expressiveness over rhythm and groove, the ensemble created a playground of rich, soft harmony overwhich Salvant’s vocals soared and dived. Poole and Nakamura, freed from their instruments’ typical role as timekeeper, often seemed to be working from a language that hewed more closely to classical traditions.
The set was an eclectic collection — four show tunes, three original compositions, and two songs pulled from the edges of jazz canon — held together by Salvant’s unique approach to arrangement, which enlisted her jaw-dropping vocals in service to what Salvant seemed to think of as her foremost responsibility, that of the storyteller.
In every song, Salvant was transformed into a new character. At times her voice, capable of sustaining perfect tone across four octaves, fell instead into a snarl, a scream, a whisper, a whine. She twisted her arms above her head, behind her back, or, as an aspiring starlet from Sondheim’s Gypsy, brought her palms open in front of her chest as she begged “all that I need is eighty-eight bucks, papa.”
Salvant’s favorite archetype seemed to be that of the tortured woman — tortured by hope, by patriarchy, by loss, by love, by anything, so long as it was torturous. Salvant introduced her last song, “Pirate Jenny,” as “revenge fantasy.” The song, from the 1928 The Threepenny Opera, tells the story of a mistreated hotel maid, who imagines (or conjures?) a pirate ship, pulling into port. The pirates raid the town, chain up the townfolk, and bring them in front of the maid for judgement.
“Asking me, Kill them now or later? Asking me,” Salvant sang. “Kill them now? Or later?”
A beat passed. Salvant smiled a macabre smile.
“Right. Now,” she said, and pushed up her glasses.
The performance was followed by a discussion between Salvant and Professor Daphne Brooks, whose research spans Yale’s departments of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music.
The show was billed as the capstone concert of the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective’s annual three-day jazz festival. The YUJC facilitates jam sessions and private lessons for Yale students, as well as bringing in outside artists to perform. The Schwarzman Center has previously collaborated with the YUJC to host student performances; Saturday’s event marks the first time that the Schwarzman center helped to facilitate the annual festival. YUJC musicians opened for Salvant with a three-song set.
Bassist and Yale undergraduate Thara Joseph, who played with the YUJC on Saturday night, remarked that after the set, the YUJC ensemble struggled to characterize exactly what they had just heard.
“I think the reason why we’re finding it hard to categorize it is because she is actually one of a kind,” Joseph said. “She’s leading the charge. It’s gonna be hard to categorize something we’ve never seen before. It’s just Cécile.”
To sample her work, check out the above video from a different recent performance.