{"id":142300,"date":"2023-10-13T13:54:43","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T13:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity-hub.com\/?p=142300"},"modified":"2023-10-13T13:54:43","modified_gmt":"2023-10-13T13:54:43","slug":"louder-bigger-more-exaggerated-how-a-grammy-winning-singer-learned-to-love-audiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity-hub.com\/lifestyle\/louder-bigger-more-exaggerated-how-a-grammy-winning-singer-learned-to-love-audiences\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Louder, bigger, more exaggerated\u2019: How a Grammy-winning singer learned to love audiences"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Jane Cornwell<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant may or may not have a mermaid\u2019s tail or a pair of wings sprouting from her back.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou never know,\u201d says the multi-Grammy-winning jazz singer with a laugh, Zooming from her home in Brooklyn, New York, in a pair of big, green glasses, their rims pierced with pins and rings. \u201cI could be swishing as we speak.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are talking about her seventh album M\u00e9lusine<\/i>, a mainly French-language gem whose diverse range of songs \u2013 some of them her own, others dating back to the 12th century \u2013 combines to tell the European folkloric legend of M\u00e9lusine, a woman who becomes a serpent from the waist down on Saturdays and who, after being spied upon by her lover, turns into a dragon and takes flight.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Jazz singer C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Karolis Kaminskas<\/cite><\/p>\n

\u201cThese female creatures are loaded with metaphor,\u201d says the Miami-born Salvant, recently home after wowing at Scotland\u2019s Edinburgh Festival. She performed two shows: a concert of jazz standards and rare musical discoveries sung in English, French and Haitian Creole (her teacher mother is French, her doctor father is from Haiti), and the UK premiere of Ogresse<\/i>, an orchestral suite about a lovesick, overweight monster who lives in a forest (tagline: She falls in love. She eats the guy. She dies<\/i>).<\/p>\n

\u201cMy M\u00e9lusine wanted her privacy, her room of one\u2019s own, and that gets betrayed. It\u2019s this thing of how difficult and contradictory it is to be in a woman\u2019s body. It can be uncomfortable, even scary. You might want to be invisible. Or you might want to be seen and desired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Salvant has only performed the darkly humorous Ogresse<\/i> a handful of times since debuting the piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. Her self-penned libretto takes digs at sexism, racism and fat-phobia, and inspiration from both the female Haitian vaudon<\/em> (\u201cvoodoo\u201d) loa<\/i>\/goddess Erzulie, and the tragic true story of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman with protruding buttocks who was exhibited\/exploited in 19th-century European \u2018freak shows\u2019. Duality, again, is a theme.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe strong, beautiful woman, this \u2018I am perfect as I am\u2019, but I also like the idea of the deeply flawed, troubled, ugly female and what that means,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am so attracted to, and a bit afraid of, these female monster archetypes. They have a fierceness and power that I don\u2019t have and wish I had.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jazz, for Salvant, isn\u2019t only about singing, even if her voice is an instrument so pristine, elastic and all-stops-out glorious it has critics swooning. In 2017 the revered jazz trumpeter\/educator Wynton Marsalis declared,\u201cYou get a singer like this once in a generation or two.\u201d To which we might add, you get a singer like this who explores intersectionality, whose visual aesthetic involves her own multimedia artwork, who covers everything from baroque \u201cmad songs\u201d to Barbra Streisand bangers, who experiments with electronics and who sometimes sings in the ancient Occitan language.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant has won three Grammys.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Karolis Kaminskas<\/cite><\/p>\n

\u201cJazz has long been associated with race, diversity, radical ideas. It has a rich feminist history and a rich queer history,\u201d says Salvant, a self-proclaimed \u201cmaximalist\u201d who started learning classical piano aged four and joined the Miami Choral Society aged eight. Whose musical tastes were shaped by those of her liberal, well-travelled parents: classical, opera, hip-hop, soul, Latin, jazz. Folk sounds from Europe. Rhythms from the Caribbean and West Africa. \u201cWhen you have access to all that as a child, it opens up your world.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 18 she relocated to the university city of Aix-en-Provence in southern France, close to where her maternal grandmother lived, to do a bachelor\u2019s in law and a stint in the classical music program at the conservatory.<\/p>\n

On a whim, she took up jazz. The more she listened to the likes of Carmen McRae, Abbey Lincoln and Bessie Smith, divas celebrated for their wise-cracking lines and note-bending renditions, the more it appealed. Her teacher, a reeds player, was so dazzled by Salvant\u2019s prowess that he formed a band, C\u00e9cile & the Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Bonnel Paris Quintet, and released an album in 2010.<\/p>\n

That same year she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition and figured she\u2019d better move to New York. There she took classes in composition and music theory at the New School in Greenwich Village and sought out musicians similarly keen to subvert the Great American Songbook, to add intellectual rigour to tunes such as Valaida Snow\u2019s racist 1935 ditty You Bring Out the Savage in Me<\/em>, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David\u2019s Wives and Lovers<\/em> (1963).<\/p>\n

Salvant\u2019s passion for \u201cnerdy research\u201d \u2013 tracing the family trees of songs and historical figures, reading books on myth, psychology, visual art \u2013 informs her choice of covers and subject. But inspiration can strike from anywhere. Salvan thrives on unruliness. On surprise.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant posing with her Grammy in 2019.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty<\/cite><\/p>\n

If she upset purists with her edgy interpretations of familiar songs, so be it (her angular take on Pirate Jenny<\/em> from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill\u2019s The Threepenny Opera<\/i> led to a Scottish critic walking out of her Edinburgh gig). \u201cWe do the songs differently each show.\u201d A good-natured shrug. \u201cWhat is played as a slow ballad one night might have swing and energy the next time. It depends what everybody is doing \u2013 the pianist, drummer, double bassist. We\u2019re all feeding off each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

And after three Grammy wins for consecutive albums For One to Love<\/i> (in 2016), Dreams and Daggers<\/i> (in 2018) and The Window<\/i> (in 2019), the accolades have kept rolling in. In 2020 Salvant received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the only musician among 21 winners from fields including literature, neuroscience and engineering. She was hunkered down in Harlem when she heard.<\/p>\n

\u201cLockdown had been so isolating,\u201d she says. \u201cBut with no audience or feedback I felt free to pursue ideas I\u2019d been thinking twice about.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant performing in New Orleans. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty<\/cite><\/p>\n

One of which is her spectral take on Kate Bush\u2019s Wuthering Heights<\/em> (\u201cthe best adaptation of the book\u201d), a highlight of 2022\u2019s acclaimed Ghost Song<\/i>, an album informed by the pandemic\u2019s othering of time, and by the deaths of Salvant\u2019s grandmother and her friend and drummer Lawrence Leathers. The album was released on the same day her first solo art exhibition, also titled Ghost Song<\/i>, opened at a Brooklyn gallery.<\/p>\n

M\u00e9lusine<\/i> comes accompanied by a book of her drawings, many of which (dragons in flight, a woman with a tail, a woman alone in a forest), and more, are projected onto a screen throughout Ogresse<\/i> \u2013 whose story Salvant is currently turning into an animated 80-minute film. She is also working on a new album of original material, and another with a French symphony orchestra, between basking in the love on stages in Europe, Australia and the US. A few weeks after our interview she performed America the Beautiful<\/em> live at the US Open Women\u2019s Singles Final, wearing a white maxi-dress and her oversized green pierced glasses.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce upon a time the thought of performing in public horrified me,\u201d she says. \u201cThen l slowly started looking at the audience and enjoying the moment, even though I\u2019m shy and don\u2019t like being gawked at.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I do love that transformational space because I get to be this other type of creature when I get out there. Louder, bigger, more exaggerated. And it\u2019s not ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

She smiles, and shimmies \u2013 swishes? \u2013 her shoulders. \u201cIt\u2019s expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant will perform at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival on Sunday, October 29, and at the Sydney International Women\u2019s Jazz Festival on Tuesday, October 31.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. <\/i><\/b>Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday<\/i><\/b>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

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By Jane Cornwell Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant may or may not have a mermaid\u2019s tail or a pair of wings sprouting from her back. \u201cYou never know,\u201d says the multi-Grammy-winning jazz singer with a laugh, Zooming from her home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018Louder, bigger, more exaggerated\u2019: How a Grammy-winning singer learned to love audiences - Celebrity-hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/celebrity-hub.com\/lifestyle\/louder-bigger-more-exaggerated-how-a-grammy-winning-singer-learned-to-love-audiences\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018Louder, bigger, more exaggerated\u2019: How a Grammy-winning singer learned to love audiences - Celebrity-hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Jane Cornwell Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. 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