This Friday, March 4, the virtuoso jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant launches her sixth album, Ghost Song, his first collaboration with the prestigious label Nonesuch Records. This very beautiful and captivating disc, much of which was recorded during the pandemic, succeeds The Windowwhich was released in September 2018 and which revealed the alchemy of the duo formed by the Franco-American artist and the pianist Sullivan Fortner, an album distinguished by a Grammy Award – like the two previous ones.
Three and a half years later, with Ghost Songthe young thirty-year-old offers seven original songs and five covers of music by Kate Bush (the famous Wuthering Heights), Sting, Gregory Porter, Harold Arlen and Kurt Weill. Not imposing any style barrier, the vocalist explores – and assumes – very varied aesthetics – pop, jazz, world, folk – as she likes to do, venturing beyond the borders of the musical genre that has seen flourish.
The album opens and closes with a cappella singing in the traditional Irish sean-nós vocal style, which gives the feeling of a loop. Cécile McLorin Salvant attempted to mirror the songs on the album to each other, the ghost of Wuthering Heights and that ofUnquiet Grave being placed respectively at the opening and closing of a disc crossed, moreover, by the themes of nostalgia and desire.
For the singer, the story of Ghost Song will remain marked by two mournings, that of the former drummer of his trio Lawrence Leathers, who died suddenly in 2019, and that of his grandmother, who disappeared after the recording of the disc. In the meantime, another program is biding its time: even before making the previous album The WindowCécile McLorin Salvant had written and recorded a piece entitled Ogresson which she has great ambitions.
Ghost Song (Cécile McLorin Salvant)
Franceinfo Culture: the Ghost Song album was recorded during the pandemic. How did you experience this period, artistically and personally?
Cécile McLorin Salvant : This period helped me to inspire new songs, but it blocked me in other areas. Before, I was a little insomniac. With the pandemic, I developed insomnia that I only recently started to manage…I had moments of crisis, I felt like time was standing still, but in fact time was passing too fast… Suddenly, I’m 32, I didn’t understand. We lost a lot of experiences… Like everyone else, I think. But I also experienced beautiful things. In New York, in my neighborhood, everything has changed. Before, in the United States, you couldn’t go out with a bottle too much, drink from a bottle… And there, people found themselves in parks, there were tables, terraces, which is not widespread. We saw more and more people outside, there was a very special atmosphere, with very beautiful moments and… rotten moments!
The song I Lost My Mindplaced in the middle of the disc, is it linked to one of these moments of crisis?
I lost my mind [traduction : J’ai perdu la raison] explains my state of mind. As we were working on the album, I started to have this idea, this feeling in my head, with what it can entail, positive and negative, the celebration of what can be liberating in this experience: “I’ve lost my mind and it gives me some freedom.” For me, it’s something quite important when trying to create, to make music, art. The beginning of the song evokes the fact of being in an hourglass, of sunbathing on the sand of a beach inside this object. I really had that feeling. We’re at the window, we watch what’s going on outside, we can’t go out and time passes, despite everything. At that time, I was obsessed with hourglasses. I love this object and I then reached the peak of my obsession! I collected them, I drew them all the time, I looked at the paintings where they appeared…
Regardless of the crisis experienced during the pandemic, are you afraid of the passage of time?
[Elle réfléchit] Yes and no. The first answer is yes. But at the same time, when we resign ourselves to it, when we tell ourselves that we have no choice, that time will pass, I find that there is something comforting in knowing that it will pass, even bad things, bad times. It goes.
Until (Gordon Sumner, aka Sting)
The themes of the ghost, of mourning in the broadest sense, run through the album… Was the death of drummer Lawrence Leathers, who was a musical partner and a friend, very present in your mind when writing certain songs?
Yes. Lawrence’s death, I have no words to express how much it affected me. He is with me, in my thoughts, I think of him every day, I miss him a lot. Of course, it’s in this album. It’s impossible to say that it is in such and such a song. It’s been in everything I’ve done since. Corn Ghost Song [titre éponyme du disque] is a song I wrote before he died. She speaks of mourning but also of nostalgia, of memory, of this idea of celebrating absence. It’s a celebration of the imagination, of imagining a spirit that is there, with us, and for it to become real… If this wasn’t premeditated at the time of writing, the things have changed. My grandmother died last summer when the album was almost finished. Today I accept the idea that all this can speak of mourning.
Do you remember any particularly strong or magical moments during the writing or recording process?
I saved Wuthering Heights in a church. A snowstorm was coming, we were in down jackets in the church with gloves, we were shaking… I was singing Wuthering Heights trembling. I also remember writing songs at home. I was in the shower, the songs came suddenly! But one of the most magical moments was when I sang with my nieces, at their house in Miami, a quote from Colette, a writer my grandmother adored. [ndlr : pour la chanson Thunderclouds]. There was this generational aspect with these nieces who are the great-granddaughters of my grandmother who died shortly afterwards. It was a huge moment for me.
Thunderclouds (Cécile McLorin Salvant), concluded with a quote from Colette (voice of the singer’s nieces)
Alongside your last two records, you recorded another program, Ogress, unpublished to date. Can you tell us about it?
Ogress was a huge project for me, which opened up a lot of things. It’s an 80-minute musical tale that I wrote everything for, with several characters, an ogress in the woods, a love story… It was completely different from anything I had done before, I was really scared. Doing this project gave me the impetus to continue in a momentum where now it was more like me who took the initiative. Before, I was quite passive, I recorded when I was asked to do so, I recorded the sound of the band I was playing with, there was not much thought beforehand. With Ogress, I really started sculpting the projects. There are two songs in French, the rest are in English, the arrangements are by Darcy James Argue. In the studio, we were thirteen or fourteen.
When will this music be released?
We are in the process of making an animated feature film. I’m co-directing the project with a Belgian animator, Lia Bertels, who is incredible. This type of project is very expensive and takes a long time, three or four years. The music was recorded in December 2019, just before the Covid. All the animation is made from this recording. When we decided to make a feature film, I chose not to release the music before the film.
Over time, do you feel an evolution in your voice and the way you sing? In the disc, you use fewer effects than usual. Is it thoughtful or spontaneous?
I think it’s coming little by little. Among young singers, there is often a tendency – and this is really my case! – to want to sound older than what we are. When I was 14, I wanted to have the voice of a 50-year-old alto who had smoked all her life, and had a deep, rich kind of voice… We’re trying to create fake wealth! A few months ago, I listened to myself in a video where I must have been 18 years old. I hear my voice, it is serious, I wanted to have the voice of a much older person. Now, I think I accept the fact that I have a high voice, I am a soprano, I have a voice that is placed in a certain place and you have to accept it! [elle rit] I think I know my voice more than before. I keep trying things, sounds and I think I will for the rest of my life. But I notice it, my voice changes, and then it ages too!