For One to Love
Cécile McLorin Salvant
(Sheer Sound/JUSTIN TIME/Mack Avenue)
Four stars
To stand out today as a jazz vocalist – we’re talking traditional, singer plus three-piece, capital-J Jazz, the kind your weird uncle swears is the only type of music that matters – is no small feat. This might not be the first place you have seen the name Cécile McLorin Salvant. If it is, here’s a brief introduction.
The fantastic For One to Love is the third album from the 26-year-old from Miami. Her previous release, 2013's WomanChild, was nominated for the Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy, and received enough attention for the up-and-coming talent to make some people outside the jazz community sit up and take notice.
It wasn’t enough to make her a household name, perhaps, but for jazz fans, her latest release is one of the most anticipated and exciting of the year. For non-jazz fans, there’s plenty here to like, not the least of which is Salvant’s playful, pitch-perfect delivery of love songs both old and new, sweet and bitter.
Opener Fog is one of the record's five original tracks – and perhaps its best. The singer might be showing off a bit here, setting the scene that hers is a voice that can do whatever she commands.
Salvant shows an envious range throughout another original, Left Over, in which she is aching for a clueless love just out of reach on top of minimal arrangements that make you feel a little lonely and a lot sympathetic.
This is followed by one of the most distinct and progressive versions of the 1944 classic Trolley Song you're likely to hear. The album's seven covers are arranged to her own tasteful style, while still paying much respect to the original versions that shaped her.
Salvant’s voice is rightly the star here, but her returning trio of pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Lawrence Leathers are doing their jobs beautifully by letting that be the case. The arrangements are tight and perfectly on point, but when given the chance to shine and have some fun of their own, they do so splendidly.
Their rendition of the West Side Story standard Something's Coming is stretched to a never-tiresome 10 minutes and 33 seconds, during which the drums float and the piano and bass are allowed to hit a few off-notes to accentuate the angst and optimism of whatever it is that's coming.
Were this the more adult-friendly, FM-radio days of the early 1990s, there’s a chance a track or two would have found its way to you somewhere other than as background music at a coffee shop. A popular TV channel might have featured Salvant as “buzz-worthy”.
Today, though, you'll probably have to go looking to find her. You should. She won't set Twitter on fire (unless she pulls an Esperanza Spalding and beats Justin Bieber for a Grammy), but even though that unassuming putz in Left Over doesn't see it, she's well worth your time and effort.
kjeffers@thenational.ae
