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For One to Love

Cécile McLorin Salvant

For One to Love

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: Mack Avenue
UPC: 0673203109520
Catnr: MAC 1095
Release date: 28 August 2015
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Label
Mack Avenue
UPC
0673203109520
Catalogue number
MAC 1095
Release date
28 August 2015

"Drawing    "

Jazzmozaiek, 01-7-2016
Album
Artist(s)
Composer(s)
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About the album

Shortly before the release of Cécile McLorin Salvant’s debut Mack Avenue album WomanChild, critic Ben Ratliff made a bold prediction in the pages of the New York Times. McLorin Salvant, he claimed, “is still mostly unknown to jazz audiences”—then added: “though not for much longer.” McLorin Salvant has more than validated that forecast. The last 24 months have been a whirlwind of success and acclaim for the young vocalist, who first came to the attention of jazz fans with her triumph at the 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. WomanChild went on to earn a bevy of honors, including a Grammy nomination and selection as Jazz Album Of The Year by the DownBeat International Critics Poll.
That magazine also honored McLorin Salvant in three other categories including Best Female Jazz Vocalist. A few months later, the Jazz Journalists Association selected McLorin Salvant as Up-and-Coming Jazz Artist Of The Year and as Top Female Vocalist. NPR also took, honoring WomanChild as the Best Jazz Vocal Album Of The Year in its annual critics poll. In short, no jazz singer of recent memory has garnered up more honors more quickly than Cécile McLorin Salvant.
Now she releases her follow-up Mack Avenue album, For One To Love, a more intimate and confessional project that reveals new dimensions of this young vocalist’s artistry. “I’m not playing anyone else here but myself,” McLorin Salvant explains. “I can look at many of these songs, and see that this is an event that really happened, or a feeling I’ve lived through myself. “That’s what makes it so difficult to share. It’s almost like a diary entry.”

On the new album, McLorin Salvant again shows her uncanny knack of channeling her own personality
into the work of her predecessors, both the acclaimed (Bessie Smith) and the less well-known (Blanche
Calloway, whose fame during her lifetime was eclipsed by her brother Cab). “I’ve made some choices
about celebrating strong women,” McLorin Salvant explains. “And I want to celebrate independence, the
courage not to look or act a certain way.”
McLorin Salvant is increasingly making her strongest musical statements via her own compositions, which stand out as the centerpiece on the new project. Five of the tracks on For One To Love feature her songs, and here she reminds us of those other great jazz singers, from Billie Holiday to Abbey Lincoln, who found that the most powerful expressions of moods and feelings often came via their own compositions. And McLorin Salvant also shares her vision as a visual artist in the design of the album. This field has been a focus in recent years: both at home in Harlem and on the road, she works on painting and
drawing, and is currently preparing for her first exhibition. “Music chose me,” she reflects; “in a way, I stumbled upon it. But illustrating is something I’ve chosen to do.” In short, her distinctive artistry shapes every aspect of this project. For One To Love serves as proof positive that Cécile McLorin Salvant has not only arrived, but she is still going places.
(bron: http://www.northseajazzclub.com/event/cecile-mclorin-salvant/)

Ze heeft niet alleen een welluidende naam, maar ook een magische stem. Cécile McLorin Salvant is pas vijfentwintig jaar en wordt en binnengehaald als dé vocale jazzbelofte. Ze treedt in de voetsporen van de grote drie jazzvedettes: Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan en Ella Fitzgerald. De Amerikaanse nieuwkomer was afgezien van haar verpletterende entree op het North Sea Jazz festival 2014, nog niet eerder in Nederland te zien.
15 november 2015 in de NSJC in Amsterdam!

Voordat ze op 21-jarige leeftijd de Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition wint, verdiept Salvant zich in klassieke jazz en blues en ontwikkelt ze een manier van zingen die intens, verrassend en verhalend is. In 2013 brengt ze het debuutalbum WomanChild (Mack Avenue) uit met daarop minder bekende Amerikaanse jazzsongs die volgens Salvant standards zouden moeten zijn. Het album wordt genomineerd voor een Grammy en de zangeres prijkt niet veel later bovenaan de lijstjes van vier (!) verschillende categorieën van de DownBeat Critics Poll: beste jazz album, beste jazz zangeres, beste opkomende jazz talent en beste opkomende vrouwelijke vocalist. Haar inspiratie? Bessie Smith, Bert Williams, Valaida Snow, Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln & Carmen Mcrae. In de club 15 nov. presenteert ze haar gloednieuwe album For One To Love.

Artist(s)

Cécile McLorin Salvant

The world first learned of the incredible vocal artistry of Cécile McLorin Salvant when she won the prestigious 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. In just under the span of a decade she has evolved from a darling of jazz critics and fans, to a multi-GRAMMY® Award winner, to a prescient and fearless voice in music today.  In life and in music, McLorin Salvant’s path has been unorthodox. The child of a French mother and Haitian father, she was raised in the rich cultural and musical mix of Miami. She began formal piano studies at age five and started singing with the Miami Choral Society at age eight. Growing up in a bilingual household, she was exposed to a wide variety...
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The world first learned of the incredible vocal artistry of Cécile McLorin Salvant when she won the prestigious 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. In just under the span of a decade she has evolved from a darling of jazz critics and fans, to a multi-GRAMMY® Award winner, to a prescient and fearless voice in music today.

In life and in music, McLorin Salvant’s path has been unorthodox. The child of a French mother and Haitian father, she was raised in the rich cultural and musical mix of Miami. She began formal piano studies at age five and started singing with the Miami Choral Society at age eight. Growing up in a bilingual household, she was exposed to a wide variety of music from around the world through her parents wide-ranging record collection. While jazz was part of this rich mix, her adolescent and teenage years were focused on singing classical music and Broadway. Following her desire to study abroad, she enrolled in college (Aix-en-Provence in the south of France) to study opera and law. Ironically, it was in France that McLorin Salvant began to really discover the deep roots of jazz and American music, with the guidance of instructor and jazz saxophonist, Jean-François Bonnel. Bonnel’s mentoring included bringing McLorin Salvant stacks of CDs, covering the work of jazz and blues legends as well as its lesser-known contributors. Working through these recordings, McLorin Salvant began building the foundation needed to thrive and occupy a special place in the august company of her predecessors.

Three years later, McLorin Salvant returned to the US to compete in the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. On the urging of her mother she entered the contest, but with little sense of what was awaiting her. The expatriate American jazz singer from France, surprising everyone (herself included), took top honors in the jazz world’s most demanding competition. An illustrious panel of judges – Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dianne Reeves, Kurt Elling, Patti Austin and Al Jarreau – noted her impeccable vocal technique, innate musicality, and gifts as an interpreter of popular song. “She brought down the house,” reported the Washington Post. Yet, as music critic Ann Midgett observed, “Her marathon is just beginning.”

Since 2010, McLorin Salvant has soared to the top of the music world, garnering praise and gathering awards. “She has poise, elegance, soul, humor, sensuality, power, virtuosity, range, insight, intelligence, depth and grace,” announced Wynton Marsalis. “You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.” She has been honored with top spots in DownBeat’s critic’s polls in the categories of “Jazz Album of the Year” and “Top Female Vocalist.” NPR Music has awarded her “Best Jazz Vocal Album of the Year” and “Best Jazz Vocalist.” Her debut album, WomanChild (2013), received a GRAMMY® nomination. And her following releases, For One to Love (2015) and Dreams and Daggers (2017), both won GRAMMY® Awards for “Best Jazz Vocal Album.”

McLorin Salvant is a singer whose unique style demonstrates a keen sense of the history of jazz and American music. Among her peers she is unique in the breadth and depth of her repertoire. She fearlessly performs songs from jazz’s roots in minstrel shows and ragtime, like Bert William’s “Nobody” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “Murder Ballad.” She digs deep into blues queens like Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, bringing out the mix of jubilation and sorrow that is at the core of the blues. She sings from both the center and the periphery of the Great American Songbook, unearthing forgotten songs while offering fresh interpretations of well-known standards and enlivening Broadway gems with jazzy accents. Beyond the borders of American music, she also is an expert interpreter of Francophone chansons and cabaret numbers, tracing the influence of jazz across the globe, and retracing her own personal path as a musician from America to France and back again. If that weren’t enough, McLorin Salvant is also a gifted composer whose moving additions to the repertoire reflect her unique perspective on love, life, and womanhood.

Her gifts as an artist are rooted in her intensive study of the history of American Music and her uncanny ability to curate its treasures for her audience. Her albums are explorations of the immense repository of experience and feeling that abound in popular song. She understands the special role of the musician to find and share the emotions and messages in music that speak to our past, present and future. “I am not interested in the idea of relevance,” she explains. “I am interested in the idea of presence. I want to communicate across time, through time, play with time.”

All of McLorin Salvant’s study, training, creativity, intelligence, and artistry come together in her voice. The sound of her voice, to borrow a phrase, “contains multitudes.” It covers the gamut from breathy to bold, deep and husky to high and resonant, limpid to bluesy, with a clarity and richness that is nearly unparalleled. When she first burst onto the jazz scene, many listeners were struck by her ability to recall the sound of Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughan, or Betty Carter. Yet with each new album, McLorin Salvant’s voice has become more her own, more singular. While conjuring the spirits of the ancestors, her references are controlled, focused, and purposeful. Her remarkable vocal technique never overshadows her rich interpretations of songs both familiar and obscure.

Critics praise McLorin Salvant’s gifts as an interpreter of popular song. “The marvel of Cécile McLorin Salvant is the complexity of her point of view as an artist,” writes David Hajdu in the pages of The Nation. “Like most jazz and cabaret singers, she works in a milieu that is essentially interpretive…But she chooses her material so astutely, and interprets it so adroitly, that the songs come across like the personal expression of an idiosyncratic individual with an utterly contemporary sensibility.” She inhabits the inner life of a lyric, shading them with subtle, often ironic poignancies through the use of vocal inflections, improvisations, varied phrasing, and articulation. Fred Kaplan of the New Yorker praises her “emotional range” and her ability to “inhabit different personas in the course of a song, sometimes even a phrase – delivering the lyrics in a faithful spirit while also commenting on them, mining them for unexpected drama and wit." In McLorin Salvant’s own words, “I think there is a lot of room for improvisation and surprise while still singing the lyric, and when that is successfully done it can express a great deal of emotion and reveal the different layers in the music and in the text all at once.”

Onstage, her persona is often compared to that of an actress. But, as McLorin Salvant notes, “jazz would not be what it is without its theatrical origins, vaudeville, and minstrel shows.” Through her selection of repertory and brilliant interpretations, she “plays with time,” making the musical past speak to our contemporary world. Her unflinching performance of songs from the minstrel tradition, such as Bert William’s “Nobody,” challenge us to think harder about race in America today. Her ironic, even sinister, rendition of songs like “Wives and Lovers” explore the complex intertwining of sex, gender and power. Her blues numbers are bawdy and vibrant, melancholic and forlorn, insistent and emancipatory. She sings of the ecstasy and agony of love, of jubilation and dejection, of desire and being desired, of fearlessness and fragility. “I want to get as close to the center of the song as I can,” McLorin Salvant explains. “When I find something beautiful and touching I try to get close to it and share that with the audience.” Immersed in the song and yet completely in control, McLorin Salvant brings her immense personality to the music – daring, witty, playful, honest and mischievous.

Each new recording by McLorin Salvant reveals new aspects of her artistry. WomanChild and For One to Love established her style, her command, and interpretive range. Dreams and Daggers is a work that highlights her fresh and fearless approach to art that transcends the conventional – live and in the studio, with a trio and with a string quartet, standards and original compositions – held together by a vocal delivery that cuts against the grain, ever deepening, intensifying and nuancing the lyrics.


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Aaron Diehl (piano)

Aaron Diehl approaches the piano with a delicately nuanced expressivity and an exquisitely attuned touch that have garnered him acclaim at the highest levels. From his collaborations with such jazz innovators as Wynton Marsalis, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Benny Golson, to his exploratory work in the classical realm with Philip Glass or the New York Philharmonic, to his own current-crossing recordings as a leader, Diehl is singularly committed to a journey of musical discovery regardless of genre or context.   On his latest album, Zodiac Suite, Diehl pays homage to composer/pianist Mary Lou Williams while unearthing new possibilities and pathways from one of her landmark works. Joined by the orchestral collective The Knights and special guests Evan Christopher (clarinet), Nicole Glover (tenor...
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Aaron Diehl approaches the piano with a delicately nuanced expressivity and an exquisitely attuned touch that have garnered him acclaim at the highest levels. From his collaborations with such jazz innovators as Wynton Marsalis, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Benny Golson, to his exploratory work in the classical realm with Philip Glass or the New York Philharmonic, to his own current-crossing recordings as a leader, Diehl is singularly committed to a journey of musical discovery regardless of genre or context.
On his latest album, Zodiac Suite, Diehl pays homage to composer/pianist Mary Lou Williams while unearthing new possibilities and pathways from one of her landmark works. Joined by the orchestral collective The Knights and special guests Evan Christopher (clarinet), Nicole Glover (tenor sax), Brandon Lee (trumpet), and Mikaela Bennett (soprano), Diehl breathes vibrant new life into a masterwork that the composer herself was never able to fully realize during her lifetime.
Diehl’s ventures into Williams’ expansive work are fully in keeping with his own musical trajectory. The Columbus, Ohio native began studying classical piano at the age of 7, while his passion for jazz was sparked during his attendance at the Interlochen Arts Camp in his pre-teen years, when he was exposed to the staggering, virtuosic swing of Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum. By 17 he was a finalist in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington competition, where he came to the attention of Wynton Marsalis. Diehl spent the summer before his first year at Juilliard touring Europe with the Wynton Marsalis Septet.
Winning the American Pianists Association’s 2011 Cole Porter Fellowship brought Diehl to wider fame and landed him a contract with Mack Avenue Records; Zodiac Suite is his fourth leader release for the imprint. The broad spectrum of his influences has been evident from the outset, with his 2013 label debut The Bespoke Man’s Narrative including a Ravel piece alongside a Gershwin standard and an Ellington classic. His most recent release, The Vagabond, touched on composers from Sir Roland Hanna to Prokofiev to Philip Glass, as well as his own masterful compositions.
Through his role as musical director and pianist for the visionary vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, Diehl simultaneously became an in-demand soloist with classical ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the L.A. Philharmonic.
His performances have included Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, and Florence Price’s “Concerto in One Movement.” In 2024 he will premiere a new commission by composer Timo Andres with John Adams conducting the LA Philharmonic. That same year Diehl will succeed Bill Charlap as artistic director of 92NY’s long-running “Jazz in July” series.
Premiered in 1945, Zodiac Suite is best known in the trio incarnation that Williams recorded for the Asch label; within the same year she also performed the piece, each of its movements inspired by an astrological sign, in expanded versions for chamber-jazz ensemble at the Town Hall and for symphony orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Arriving just three years after Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown, and Beige” and a dozen years before Gunther Schuller coined the term “Third Stream,” the Carnegie Hall event should have been hailed as a touchstone in the fusion of jazz and classical music, but a lack of preparation and rehearsal time led to a compromised performance, leaving Williams frustrated, never to reprise the epic arrangement.
“Mary Lou Williams evolved and changed over time,” Diehl says. “She lived through a significant portion of the development of 20th century music, but she always kept her foundation intact. The roots were always there. She struggled continually with people accepting her on her own terms and recognizing her significant contributions. I hope this album will encourage people to investigate more of her music.” Diehl’s connection to Williams’ body of work is a personal one. In 2003, he met Father Peter O’Brien, the elder pianist’s longtime manager and, after the composer’s death, Executive Director of the Mary Lou Williams Foundation. Their paths crossed initially through a performance of Williams’ music by the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra while Diehl was a student. Later, in 2006, the two encountered each other at St. Joseph of the Holy Family in Harlem, where Diehl was music director, and O’Brien was a guest presider. O’Brien asked Diehl to perform Williams’ “Mass for the Lenten Season,” though a planned recording was derailed when the priest passed away in 2015. “His passion inspired in me a sense of responsibility,” Diehl writes in his liner notes, “a delving further into Williams’ oeuvre, and a continued mission to emphasize the importance of her contributions.” “It’s an ongoing challenge, even today, to incorporate the language of Black American folk music into this very Eurocentric identity with all its nuances,” he said. “I can only do my small part to celebrate Mary Lou Williams’ music whenever it’s possible because she was such a brilliant artist. It’s important to keep advocating on behalf of these folks who are no longer with us and to keep their music in people’s ears for generations to come.”
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Paul Sikivie (double bass)

Composer(s)

Press

Drawing    
Jazzmozaiek, 01-7-2016

"Cécile McLorin Salvant has a voice that touches deep in the soul. A singer to treasure."
Jazzflits, 14-3-2016

Le Soir / 09-03-2016
Le Soir, 09-3-2016

''She was an extraordinary jazztalent that played on the North Sea Jazz Festival 2014. The young Cécile McLorin Salvant took the audience in, in a staggering strong way.''
NRC Handelsblad, 01-3-2016

5*****     [''].. With 26 years, Cécile McLorin Salvant can be considerd as one of the rising diva-stars."  
Jazzmozaiek, 01-10-2015

5***** ["].. The French-American vocalist is already called 'a new jazz legend' by jazzconnoisseurs. She's even mentioned in the same breath with great artists as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Mahalia Jackson."  
Jazzism, 01-10-2015

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