CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT

26/10

20:00

TICKET

The ghosts playing the lead roles in Cécile McLorin Salvant’s rhapsodic Ghost Song are not the Hollywood kind. They’re

closer temperamentally to the fleeting, elusive presences Emily Dickenson famously celebrated in verse:

One need not be a chamber to be haunted.
One need not be a house.
The brain has corridors surpassing material place.

Ghost Song, Salvant’s Nonesuch debut, explores the (many) ways people can be haunted—by lingering memories, roads not taken, ghosts real and imagined. Its intense, disquietingly evocative songs follow living souls as they confront torments of absence—some characters lament loved ones gone too soon, others are troubled by the remnants of vanished romance, others are paralyzed by the sense of time galloping past.

It is a breathtaking, fully realized conceptual work from an artist whose trajectory has moved at warp speed. Born in Miami, Florida in 1989, Salvant studied piano beginning at age five, sang in a children’s choir at eight, and then began classical voice lessons. She pursued dual tracks as an undergraduate in France (her mother is French, her father Haitian) —studying French law at one university while attending the Darius Milhaud Conservatory studying baroque music and jazz. Though at the time she didn’t intend to sing professionally, she entered the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010 and won it.

That led to a string of five acclaimed releases, each one more daring than the previous. Yet nothing Salvant has done can quite prepare listeners for the visceral intensity, concise yet prismatic writing, and genre-obliterating atmospheres of Ghost Song. The work draws on the tools this vocalist, composer, multiple Grammy winner, and MacArthur Fellow has utilized in the past, but in new and harrowing ways. It is, in the least glib sense possible, the rare departure that is also an arrival.

Ghost Song situates Salvant’s image-rich originals alongside radical reimaginings of songs by Kate Bush, Gregory Porter, Sting, Harold Arlen, and Kurt Weill. Each of the pieces describes a different type of engagement with unquiet spirits, and each dwells within a detailed, highly specific musical atmosphere. The stylistic range is astonishing: Brooding minor-key torch songs sit next to argumentative Sondheim-style music theater dialogs sit next to ancient folk melodies sit next to invitingly spacious (and harmonically complex) jazz meditations.

Salvant traces the origins of Ghost Song to her previous project, the longform Ogresse, a fable in the form of a cantata that required her to sing all the characters. She wrote the story, lyrics, and music, and collaborated with Darcy James Argue on arrangements for a thirteen-piece orchestra. The work is being developed into an animated feature-length film.

“That was completely my initiative to make. Beforehand, I had always followed the lead of whatever label I was with, asking for a new recording. This was a commission project, but, actually, I shopped for commissioners once it was already written ... that was the start of me being more active and less passive in the process of making music. [And that] carries over to Ghost Song. I think it came directly from the confidence that making Ogresse gave me.”

The nature of Ghost Song—its thematic unity, its carefully rendered scenes—has prompted Salvant to rethink the way she performs as well. In the past, she’s called tunes in the moment, based on the mood of the audience or the energy on stage. This project almost demands a different approach.

But when asked if she believes in ghosts, Salvant becomes conflicted. “I’m pretty much a skeptic. I was about to say I don’t believe in ghosts, because I’m a materialist—I need to see it. But then again, I’m completely in love with stories, I delve into stories so easily. So, I guess then I love ghosts.”

Localización
Teatro Pavón

Entradas
Platea 25€
Anfiteatro 20€

Duración 90 min

Apertura de puertas
30 minutos antes

SEPTIEMBRE

MELISSA ALDANA

15

RICHARD BONA

19

ONDARA

22

JUDI JACKSON

27

NEAL FRANCIS

HYATUS KAIYOTE

OCTUBRE

YOUN SUN NAH

CECILE McLORIN

BLUE LAB BEATS

DIANNE REEVES

AZIZA

KURT ELLING

10/09 - 25/11

INSTAGRAM

FREEDONIA

MARK GUILIANA

LUCKY CHOPS

MADELEINE PEYROUX

YOU SUN NAH

HYATUS KAIYOTE

PATAX

LETTUCE

GIANLUCA PETRELLA

CHANWA

ADIO ASIS

RAUL MIDON

CECILE M

LORIN

MARCOS VALLE

PHIL LASSITER

JUDITH HILL

TAKUYA KURODA

EMMET COHEN

JULIAN LAGE

AVISHAI COHEN

STACEY KENT

BLUE LAB BEATS

THE BAD PLUS

KENNY GARRET

DIANNE REEVES