In the US and other Anglophone countries where she performs mostly in English, we have also had the opportunity to hear her perform many songs in French. When Salvant performs in France and in Francophone countries, she often understandably foregrounds French language songs. Interweaving songs from different time periods and different cultural traditions, the result is a captivating musical narrative that tells us something about the way the harmonies and dissonances of human history figure into our contemporary experience. Salvant articulates this European tale with the story of Damballah and Ayida Wedo, so central to Haitian Voudou. But this is her secret that can never be revealed-female power whose very condition of possibility is secrecy and concealment. This legend, rooted in European folklore, and related to siren tales that traverse multiple cultures, depicts a woman, whose lower extremity periodically assumes the form of a serpent. Mélusine traces the legend of a woman who is vulnerable, powerful, and tragic. Mélusine, Salvant’s most recent album, is a bold declaration that she is willing to answer the call of her expansive imagination, especially when it urges her to transgress borders based on language, genre, cultural tradition, and historical time.

But given the immensity-the breadth and depth-of her artistic vision, that would have been equivalent to aesthetic perjury. She is, without a doubt, her generation’s most accomplished jazz vocalist, and easily could have continued along the trajectory of performing and recording standards, punctuated by her own and other compositions both within and outside the borders of the genre.

And her own vocal sounds are never merely “beautiful.” Her music always urges us to apprehend complexity and contradiction-that which can be simultaneously beautiful and a reminder that historical promises of expanding freedoms often reside within what has been marginalized as bizarre or even evil. She never wants us to luxuriate in sound that is only beautiful.

Davis offers her thoughts on Salvant and the new album.Ĭécile McLorin Salvant sometimes seems reluctant to reveal what she might think of as a voice that is too perfect-so exquisite that it might bar access to the perversities that also inevitably shape our lives. They tell the folk tale of Mélusine, a woman who turns into a half-snake each Saturday after a childhood curse by her mother. Cécile McLorin Salvant’s new album, Mélusine, is a mix of originals and interpretations of songs dating as far back as the 12th century, mostly sung in French along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl.

Angela y davis women race and class