Cécile McLorin Salvant

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Cécile McLorin Salvant

Yoshi’s, Oakland, CA, June 12, 2016

Reviewed by Steve Murray for Cabaret Scenes

Cecile-McLorin-Salvant-Cabaret-Scenes-Magazine_212Since I last reviewed this internationally acclaimed jazz singer, she’s won a Best Jazz Vocal Grammy Award for For One to Love and the Jazz Journalist Association Jazz Awards Female Singer of the Year. It’s all much deserved.

Salvant, who loves little-heard songs from the ’20s and ’30s, brings a strong blues background to her eclectic style, evidenced on Blanche Calloway’s “Growlin’ Dan.” Her take on this bawdy tale of Minnie the Moocher finds Cecile eliciting guttural growls that come from deep within. Her take on the racially sensitive “You Bring Out the Savage in Me” is playful and wild, with drummer Lawrence Leathers laying down a serious tribal rhythm.

Great American Songbook tunes like Frank Loesser’s “Never Will I Marry,” Rodgers and Hart’s “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” and “The Trolley Song” (Hugh Martin) are recast into flighty jazz swings that move at sometimes dizzying speed. Aaron Deihl on piano, Paul Sikivie on bass and Leathers sustain an impossibly high level of technique for each arrangement, matched by Salvant’s ultra-creative take on jazz vocals.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Wives and Lovers,” a marital advice hit from the ’70s, gets a sly, sarcastic rebuke from Salvant, who can’t possibly believe that wives should remain attractive and attentive to their chauvinistic hubbies. Her humor is also found on Sheldon Harnick’s witty “The Ballad of the Shape of Things.
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” She accentuates the oblique geometric references (“a garment thin/that fastens with a safety pin” for a diaper) to heighten the droll humor. Irving Berlin’s “The Best Thing for You” from Call Me Madam becomes a strong declaration of self-assuredness.

And Cécile McLorin Salvant is playing with a full deck of self-confidence.
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Her talent and maturity-beyond-her years have earned her both critical and commercial success. She and collaborators Diehl, Sikivie and Leathers are setting a very high bar in the jazz world these days. More power to them.

Steve Murray

Always interested in the arts, Steve was encouraged to begin producing and, in 1998, staged four, one-man vehicles starring San Francisco's most gifted performers. In 1999, he began the Viva Variety series, a live stage show with a threefold mission to highlight, support, and encourage gay and gay-friendly art in all the performance forms, to entertain and document the shows, and to contribute to the community by donating proceeds to local non-profits. The shows utilized the old variety show style popularized by his childhood idol Ed Sullivan. He’s produced over 150 successful shows, including parodies of Bette Davis’s gothic melodramedy Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte and Joan Crawford’s very awful Trog. He joined Cabaret Scenes 2007 and enjoys the writing and relationships he’s built with very talented performers.