I was fortunate enough to attend the second of Cecile McLorin Salvant’s two sold-out gigs at Ronnie Scott’s, and was rewarded with finest night of jazz I have ever witnessed. The concert got off to a low-key start, as she opened with two songs that were new to the audience. The first of these was Fog, which will appear on her forthcoming CD, For One To Love, which is scheduled for release in early September. She then asked the audience how many people were familiar with the songs of Ethel Waters, and got a fairly muted response, before introducing Sweet Man Blues, which was originally recorded in 1925.
To open with songs that are less familiar to the audience might be considered a bold move for a relatively new performer, but Ms. Salvant had the audience in the palm of her hand. She has always tried to shine a light on little-known and scarcely recorded jazz and blues tunes, and soon introduced Most Gentleman Don’t Like Love, a Cole Porter tune from 1938, the message of which still seemed to hold true. In the first set, she also performed Confession by Judy Holliday, and Bacharach and David’s Wives And Lovers, which is not normally played in a jazz context, and will appear on her new CD.
These songs were interspersed by some more familiar tunes. Jeepers Creepers lightened the mood, whilst Billie Holiday’s Don’t Explain was performed as a duo with her superb pianist and musical director, Aaron Diehl. Salvant again impressed with her ability to totally inhabit every song she played, and make them her own. Her version of Don’t Explain played with the tempo and the phrasing, her hurt building as the song progressed, leaving me – and plenty of others, I suspect, with the hairs on the back of our neck standing on end.
We were treated to a few more tasters of the new album. Stepsister’s Lament, from the Rodgers and Hammerstein version of Cinderella, and Judy Garland’s Trolley Song, have both been in the set for some time, and will finally appear on the new CD. She also sang one song in French, her native language, entitled Le Mal De Vivre.
To my mind, the two highlights of the second set were Bessie Smith’s Give Me Some, and John Henry, which appeared on WomanChild. The former was introduced as a ‘food blues’, but was loaded with double-entendres, and had the audience laughing at her playful delivery. John Henry was more dramatic than the recorded version, and quite stunning in its execution, her stage presence bringing to mind the great Nina Simone.
It’s hard to believe that Cecile McLorin Salvant is just twenty-five years old. She has a grace and poise beyond her years, and her voice control is amazing – pitch perfect, like a Sarah Vaughan, but offering more subtlety, more light and shade in terms of her dynamics. Aaron Diehl is, for want of a better expression, the real deal, his lightness of touch quite breathtaking at times, whilst bass player Paul Sikivie and drummer Lawrence Leathers also impressed. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden suggested that Ms. Salvant was capable of extending the lineage of the Big Three – Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, and many in the audience seemed to feel the same way, knowing that they had witnessed something quite special.
