Ghost Song (Nonesuch)
Cécile McLorin Salvant
Released March 2022
Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album 2023
Jazzwise Top 10 Releases of 2022
New York Times 10 Best Jazz Albums of 2021
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2022
JAZZ FM 25 Best Jazz Albums of 2022
Jazziz Critics’ Picks 2022
New York City Record Best Vocal Releases of 2022
Slate Best Jazz Albums of 2022
70th DownBeat Annual Critics Poll Top 10 Album of the Year
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kQK4oxGxZ-sC2BT7pcV7ZmMtrUdfj7NZQ
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About:
Ghost Song features a diverse mix of seven originals and five interpretations on the themes of ghosts, nostalgia, and yearning. Salvant says, “It’s unlike anything I’ve done before—it’s getting closer to reflecting my personality as an eclectic curator. I’m embracing my weirdness!”
Ghost Song opens and ends with a sean-nós (traditional Irish unaccompanied vocal style) performance by Salvant, recorded in a church. On track one, she transitions into Kate Bush’s 1978 classic “Wuthering Heights.” Salvant says of the song, “Wuthering Heights is a book that really struck me to my core as I was making this album, during the pandemic. And the best interpretation of the novel is Kate Bush’s song.”
She continues, “It’s the most classic ghost story. I decided I wanted to do an album called Ghost Song, and I knew that one had to be on it. Then I had the idea to mix it in with the sean-nós ‘Cúirt Bhaile Nua,’ which binds it to the traditional ‘Unquiet Grave,’ the last track on the album. The ghost is not haunting me; now I am haunting the ghost. They parallel each other so well and they’re such different time periods. I wanted the album to be a circle, with the sean-nós reference at the beginning and at the end. So it is the first track but it’s also the last track and it’s also the middle track, which is how
I listen to music, walking around my neighborhood, on a plane, travelling somewhere, putting stuff on repeat.”
“All the songs on the album kind of mirror each other. I tried to create this strange symmetry. So as you go in from both ends, the songs are sort of matched together,” Salvant says. “‘I Lost my Mind’ is the center of the Russian doll. I wrote that in the middle of the pandemic. There were nights when I wanted to just scream. It was this deeper part of me saying, ‘It’s OK if this sounds completely crazy, OK to just go with the completely crazy thing and not worry if people think you have lost your mind for doing it.’
“The bands also mirror each other from top to bottom. In terms of the instrumentation, everything,” Salvant explains. “That’s why the songs are there in that relationship: they match each other, they’re like fraternal twins, or one is the evil twin of the other. I, as the living, am visited by the ghost, and then I go visit the ghost in turn. I am haunting the ghost and annoying the ghost, which is saying, ‘Get out of here and go live.’”
Track Listing:
1. Wuthering Heights (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 02:43
2. Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying (Harold Arlen / E.Y. “Yip” Harburg / Gregory Porter / Herbert Stothart) 07:23
3. Ghost Song (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 03:22
4. Obligation (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 01:32
5. Until (Gordon Sumner) 06:31
6. I Lost My Mind (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 03:40
7. Moon Song (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 03:04
8. Trail Mix (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 02:23
9. The World Is Mean (Marc Blitzstein / Bertolt Brecht / Kurt Weill) 04:48
10. Dead Poplar (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 02:36
11. Thunderclouds (Cécile McLorin Salvant) 03:36
12. Unquiet Grave (Traditional) 04:21
Personnel:
Cécile McLorin Salvant: vocals, piano
Paul Sikivie: electric and acoustic bass, synth
Sullivan Fortner: piano, Fender Rhodes, vocals
Alexa Tarantino: flute
Aaron Diehl: piano, pipe organ
Marvin Sewell: guitar
James Chirillo; banjo
Daniel Swenberg: lute
Burniss Travis: bass
Kyle Poole: drums
Keita Ogawa: percussion
Illustration by Cécile McLorin Salvant
Recorded at Power Station at BerkleeNYC
Mixed at Amplified Art & Sound Studio Director, DP,
Editor: Matthew Edginton
Lighting and Camera Operator: Jonathan Baudoin
Camera Operator: Daniel Ulbricht
Grip and Camera Operator: Mikako Ishii
Assistant Director: Shawn McLaughlin
Recording/Mixing Engineer: Todd Whitelock
Assistant Engineer: Teng Chen
Review:
The American singer’s Cadogan Hall gig was one of the highlights of last year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, not least because she previewed material from this recording, which looks as if it could well be one of her best to date. Previous releases such as Dreams And Daggers and The Window were excellent instalments of Salvant’s astute examination of both human nature and numerous traditions of song in and beyond the ambit of jazz, but Ghost Song ups the ante in terms of personal emotional investment and musical ingenuity.
The primary undercurrent is a sense of haunting, of restlessness and torment. It is all there in Salvant’s finely shaded voice down to every careful accent and emphasis on revelatory lyrics, which are potently consolidated by the advanced subtleties of an ensemble in which master guitarist Marvin Sewell is both a suitably corporeal and spectral presence, drawing on his consummate bluesiness with no concession to cliché. Folk and art are one. In between the title track, in which Salvant delivers a brilliant take on the barriers we place on happiness in the form of pride and illusory superiority, and a rendition of ‘Wuthering Heights’ that both releases the dizzying madness of the Bronté-Bush axis and keeps a lid on it, there is a bundle of other fine pieces that are unsettling and illuminating in equal measure.
The result is music of sensitivity and intelligence, which underlines Salvant’s growth as an artist of stature whose stylistic choices are as daring as they are mature.
Kevin Le Gendre (Jazzwise)
