It’s quite simple, for Cécile McLorin Salvant. “I like to sing in the language of the public for whom I sing. Yes, the jazz singer’s career is international. Yes, she sings mainly in English, an interpreter without limits, able to go to Billie Holiday as much as to Kate Bush, to go around the Great American Songbook and end up with Kurt Weil or Apollinaire (music by Poulenc). Having been born in Miami does not define her either: with Haiti on her father’s side, Tunisia and Guadeloupe on her mother’s side, he who cares, she who teaches (she runs a Franco-English school in Florida) , she is everywhere, Cécile. With the acute accent. ” It’s me ! And French is my first language! »
We are not at Las Vegas Celine who crosses out the acute accent so that the name is more easily pronounced. When you are Cécile McLorin Salvant, from Haitian culture, French culture and American culture, you necessarily have a particular sensitivity for languages and cultures, in danger or not. Being assertive goes without saying. “I don’t feel it as a responsibility, but as a pleasure. ” A wealth. In a show in France, in 2019, she did not sing less in recall these words, quoted in a report by France Culture: “ They don’t want me to sing in French / They just want me to sing the blues “. The show was mainly composed of titles from the French repertoire, from Barbara to Brassens.
What will she sing at the Monument-National on July 2, starring at the Montreal International Jazz Festival? “I would like to do a lot more of my repertoire in French! Until singing the Quebec repertoire? She does not commit to it, but for her, everything is possible, everything is tempting. “I try to follow my intuition, to mix my influences, to do according to my mood! And above all, to know that it will not necessarily work! These are tests. »
Thus the recording of his version of Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush), in a church, a cappella for the most part, was less for her a feat to accomplish (song with a crazy register, impossible to resume, it was said) than a desire, the desire to live the experience. While the TV series Stranger Things propels Running Up That Hill at the top of the charts and that everyone is rediscovering Kate Bush, Cécile’s initiative becomes strangely prescient. ” Yes ! It’s quite amazing! ” She is happy. For Kate Bush, for herself, for the songs that live, live and live again.
The Scrapbook Ghost Song, released at the end of winter by Nonesuch, will be at the heart of the show: she is coming with her ghosts, in a way. Mourning loved ones, pandemic, the recent past is charged, dark, but not only personal. “It is not for me the ghost of this pandemic. It’s an album that speaks of desire and absence. These are subjects that have interested me since I started singing. The way this album was recorded was dictated by the pandemic, but the exploration of desire and absence, not really. The pandemic has highlighted them. »
Impossible not to mention what just happened to the Supreme Court, which canceled Roe v. wade. Is it possible to go on stage and not talk about it, or to choose one or more songs for the occasion? We think of Rhiannon Giddens, who offered an a cappella version of Peggy Seeger’s song The Judge’s Chair. We say to ourselves that the voice of Cécile McLorin Salvant, by the multiplicity of her origins, an American citizen, needs more than ever to be heard. How does she react? “It’s infuriating! But I try to take a step back, to look at the movement of history in a more general way. The United States was built on these kinds of systems, and we keep going! »
Sing, draw, embroider!
Keep singing, keep performing, and keep… embroidering. Cécile draws (her album covers and booklets, in particular), and the creation of embroidered patterns that may or may not become the clothes she wears has always been an integral part of the process. Especially during the pandemic. ” Yes ! I embroidered constantly. I made huge drawings. When I embroider, I listen to music or the radio, but also my mind wanders, and after a while, often an idea comes, a piece of text, a melody. »
It is his deep nature. A multicolored identity. His own songs have the colors of his drawings, his embroideries. And the range of its interpretation options is endless. “I think whether musicians or not, we all have a hard time defining our own identity. We are clumsy with our own definitions, our own categorisations. We change our minds, we change words, we lose the taste for certain things. Our principles are wavering. I think we should try everything we like in life, whether in music or otherwise, if we have the chance and the courage to do so. »