Cécile McLorin Salvant won her first Grammy for WomanChild in 2014. She was twenty-four. She has won two more since, for For One To Love and Ghost Song. She is, by any conventional measure, at the peak of her powers.
When we speak, she has been working on a new record for eight months and is in the middle of what she describes as a sustained period of unlearning.
You’ve said in other interviews that you distrust fluency. Can you say more about that?
It’s not that fluency is wrong, exactly. It’s more that when something comes easily, I’ve learned to ask why. Is it coming easily because I’ve genuinely understood it, or because I’ve found a performance of it that works and I’m doing that performance rather than the actual thing?
The distinction matters more than it might seem. A performance of a song — even a very good performance — is a representation. What I’m interested in is something more like possession. The song takes over rather than me presenting it.
How do you know the difference?
I don’t, while it’s happening. That’s the thing. I find out afterward, listening back. A performance sounds like performing — there’s a kind of finish on it, a demonstrating quality. What I want sounds more exposed. More like something is actually at stake.
I’ve been studying some old recordings lately — Billie Holiday’s very early work, some of the 1933 sessions. She was seventeen, eighteen years old. The voice hasn’t yet found its characteristic sound. But what she does with certain phrases is more honest, I think, than some of the later recordings where you can hear her technique. There’s something raw that she traded for something more controlled. I’m not saying the later work is worse — it’s extraordinary. But the raw thing is interesting.
You trained in Aix-en-Provence, studied classical and baroque music. How much of that training is still active in what you do?
All of it. The baroque repertoire gave me an understanding of ornamentation — how a single note can be approached from many different angles, how embellishment is a form of interpretation rather than decoration. That’s not specific to baroque music, but it’s where I learned it most rigorously.
And classical training generally gives you a relationship to the written score that’s different from jazz training. You learn that the score is not the music — the music is what happens when you perform it — but also that the score knows things the performance doesn’t know yet. There’s a kind of humility the written page requires. I carry that into jazz repertoire even when there’s no score.
The songs you write yourself — what’s the relationship to that discipline?
Very direct. I take the same position with my own songs that I take with standards — the song is smarter than I am. My job is to find out what it knows. When I’m writing something, I try not to close it down too early. I try to leave room for the song to tell me what it’s actually about, which is often not what I thought it was about when I started.
You’ve described your visual art practice as essential to the music work. What does drawing give you that singing doesn’t?
Slowness, mainly. And a different relationship to failure. When a drawing doesn’t work, you can look at it for a long time and understand quite precisely what went wrong. Music is gone. You can listen to a recording but the experience of the performance is gone. Drawing lets me stay with something that isn’t working and learn from it at whatever pace I need.
I also find that images give me angles into songs that purely musical analysis wouldn’t. I’ll draw a character from a song — a woman from a 1920s torch ballad, say — and discover something about her relationship to the story that changes how I sing the song.
When we finish, she mentions she has been reading Clarice Lispector. We talk about The Passion According to G.H. for a while — the way the novel enacts its argument rather than merely stating it. She draws the parallel to song herself, without prompting.
She knows exactly what she is doing. That is the first and deepest impression she leaves.
