Cécile McLorin Salvant - Ghost Song (2022) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Just to show that there will be a Ghost Song before and after, Cécile McLorin Salvant opens her album with a rather unexpected cover of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights that she starts totally a cappella. Of course, the Franco-American has never followed the tradition of jazz singers to the letter – or what is expected of them – but here she drives the nail a little deeper both in her diction, still as original and fascinating, as in the – eclectic – instrumentation she has chosen. And then she herself admits that she was really interested, for the very first time, in the production of her recording. To a sound quest and not just to offer a simple photo of her and her band, as in the past. Here, the 2010 winner of the Thelonious Monk International Competition dares everything. The nonchalant ballad, carried by the virtuoso piano of his brilliant accomplice Sullivan Fortner (Moon Song), like the vibrant sean-nós, this highly ornamented style of traditional Irish singing (Unquiet Grave), or the cover at the same time jumping and grandiloquent of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (The World is Mean). Ghost Song offers a kind of extraterrestrial gospel before landing on a more muted pitch or a theatrical declamation and so on … One can easily be confused by this leapfrog-like eclecticism with sounds and decades, continents and moods. "I made an album like I make a playlist, able to string a twelfth-century music to a Kendrick Lamar track…". It is in this never gratuitous, never vain originality that Cécile McLorin Salvant cuts the bridges with a certain tradition of vocal jazz. Tradition that it never rejects, on the contrary, but that it destabilizes as if by Obligation. As if to better appropriate it and prevent it from drowning in the formalin of museification. One thing is for sure: jazz is alive on Ghost Song!

TRACKLIST

01. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Wuthering Heights
02. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Optimistic Voices / No Love Dying
03. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Ghost Song
04. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Obligation
05. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Until
06. Cécile McLorin Salvant - I Lost My Mind
07. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Moon Song
08. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Trail Mix
09. Cécile McLorin Salvant - The World Is Mean
10. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Dead Poplar
11. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Thunderclouds
12. Cécile McLorin Salvant - Unquiet Grave



Thanks to the Original customer.