On February 21, 2025, triple Grammy award winner for Best Jazz Vocal Album chanteuse Cécile McLorin Salvant gave a sizzling concert at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, as part of the 94th season of the Symphony Center Presents Jazz series. The diva with the enormous range sang 11 cunningly arranged songs and a 12thin encore, a staggering series of vaudeville-esque pieces, showtunes, blues songs from 20th century American history, jazz compositions of her own and unusual ephemera like the penultimate piece, from a BBC adaptation by Peter Hall of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, 1981.
She has a quirky, charming personality style, an offbeat yet gorgeous punk personal style, and a voice that can whisper-speak seductively. Pliable and electric, it triggers the senses slowly, then segues into belting out a melodic line. Always ultra articulate in vocal phrasing, Salvant reaches through melody, stretching sound. The introductions are sometimes spartan, sometimes deeply personal intellectual murmurings, after which she succeeds to tell a story in song. The sung story may be a ballad, like the startlingly almost-shouted John Henry, from her album WomanChild, 2013, about a steeldriver worked to the death with his hammer. But often what Salvant is singing “about’ is paradox, conflict, in our minds, in our feelings, especially in what we think about our emotions.
The concert opened with Obsession, first released by Sarah Vaughan in 1987, on Salvant’s 2018 album The Window, a sultry jazzy paean to a lover who lies about loving us, whom we know is lying, yet still puts “all those silver clouds” in our eyes, with a passion “that lives in the dark”. Another of her torch songs followed, Fog, from her album For One to Love, 2015, which describes a man about whom “Why would I be surprised he tells me pretty lies” and makes the singer suffer even as she notes “heartaches like these are trite and true”. Barbara’s Song from Threepenny Opera, 1928, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil, gives us a woman who “once used to think in my innocent way…that someone someday might come my way” but then cautions “if he knew how to treat a girl with due respect, I’d have to tell him no”. Dare we imagine Salvant’s smile is mischievous as she tells us so?
Yet another memorable song was Obsession, from the singer’s Ghost Song album, 2022, introduced by Salvant as containing an admonition from an artist friend: “Promises lead to expectations which lead to resentment”. Before launching the beautifully warbled expressive piece into the far reaches of Orchestra Hall, Salvant noted, (sic) “But then she told me expectations were reasonable. Now I don’t know what to think”, she murmured, laughing softly.
Salvant gave full expression to her terrific stage mates. Pianist Glenn Zaleski, according to All About Jazz, “has quickly become one of the most important pianists of his generation and it’s easy to see why”. He has his own sound, following and leading Salvant, setting her pitch, emphasizing her phrases. Bassist Yasushi Nakamura, veteran of more than a dozen bands, plays electric, acoustic, and double bass, kicking it hot and in the groove. Drummer Kyle Poole (his band of “NY jazz upstarts” is known as Poole and the Gang) has a gentle, masterful style melding ragtime and bebop with hiphop undertones. The improvisations were compelling.
And the juxtaposition between that incredibly expanding voice trilling through the octaves, setting forth the age-old dilemmas of love, complicated by the modern experience of meta communicating- (communicating about the communication) calls forth piano riffs, rapid bass fingering and sweet, sweet percussive drum backgrounds and interludes. It was a fantastic evening, unlike any other in recent memory.
For information and tickets to all the great programming of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, go to www.cso.org
All photos by Todd Rosenberg
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