Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ghost Song

Album of the Week, August 3, 2024

When I saw Cécile McLorin Salvant live for the first time, in February 2020 at Jordan Hall, I thought I knew what to expect based on her last few albums. I had heard The Window and Dreams and Daggers, as well as her 2015 recording For One to Love. I figured we were in for a night of standards, brilliantly and sometimes hilariously interpreted. Then at one point in the middle of the concert, Sullivan Fortner stepped back from the piano and Cécile took the center of the stage, and began singing an unaccompanied Appalachian ballad. We were suddenly in a very different place.

Between that Jordan Hall concert and the release of Ghost Song, a lot happened. Cécile was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in October 2020. She left her longtime home at Mack Avenue Records, where she had recorded since winning the Thelonious Monk competition in the early 2010s, for Nonesuch, which in the 2000s had built a stable of jazz artists that included Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Makaya McCraven, Ambrose Akinmusire, Mary Halvorson, and others. And of course there was the pandemic, which complicated everything.

In the end, Ghost Song is a richer, stranger album than anything Cécile had released to this point. In addition to appearances by both Sullivan Fortner on piano (and co-producer) and Aaron Diehl (on piano on two tracks and organ on “I Lost My Mind”), as well as bassist Paul Sikivie (who appears only on the first track), there is also percussion, lute, theorbo, flute, and even a children’s choir. And the content is a mix of jazz standards, originals by Salvant, pop songs, and the aforementioned Appalachian murder ballad.

The opening track of the album is a good example of the stylistic dislocation that Salvant achieves. Her opening unaccompanied melisma could at first be as old as medieval times; there is more than a little Hildegard von Bingen about the line. But there is also a strong influence from traditional Irish sean-nós singing, and by degrees as we come out of the echo of the church and closer to the singer, we realize that she is telling a story that another has told. If you’re like me, it might take until the chorus of “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home” to recognize Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” That Salvant pulls together so many different threads right at the very beginning is a “shots fired” moment, strongly laying claim to a new territory over which her incredible musicianship can roam.

And roam it does. We pivot directly into “Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying,” a medley of a Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg tune that crosses over into patter territory and is usually not included in musical summaries of The Wizard of Oz. There’s an almost imperceptible turn, and then we’re in traditional R&B territory with Gregory Porter’s “No Love Dying,” which Cécile performs as a straight ahead ballad.

And then comes “Ghost Song,” an original song by Cécile that combines a straight-up blues verse with R&B stylings on the chorus, as well as something more. It feels a little like the way Nina Simone described “Mississippi Goddamn”: “This is the theme to a musical but the musical hasn’t been written … yet.” The children’s chorus that enters at the point of the chorus further scrambles the brain. At this point it feels like anything could happen. And in “Obligation,” another original, seemingly it does. “What happens when the foundation of a sexual encounter is guilt, not desire?/Obligation!/Promises lead to resentment!/I’d let you touch me if only it would stop your pushing/And get you leaving/Is that desire?” We’re a long way from the Cécile who apologized to her mother after singing the Bessie Smith ribald ballad “You’ve Got to Give Me Some.”

In terms of unexpected covers on a Cécile McLorin Salvant album, a song by Sting would seem to be near the top of the list. But “Until” is one of those highlights from Gordon Sumner’s more mature songwriting phase and highlights the melodic and observational skills of the writer as he was nearing the 25th anniversary of his major label debut. The song, written as a soundtrack ballad for 2001’s Kate & Leopold, owes more than a small debt to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” but the brilliance of the melodic line is such that you are inclined to merely nod your head at the allusion. And Cécile and her band do spectacular things with it, especially the mildly unhinged instrumental interlude for piano, flute and banjo that separates the two readings of the chorus, and Cécile’s hypnotic singing of the final lines of the chorus on a single note.

“I Lost My Mind” is a slightly different thing again. A Cécile original, it seems to open as a mid-1950s reverie, somewhere in Cole Porter ballad territory perhaps, before the turn happens and the pipe organ enters, playing as though evoking Philip Glass’s ghost, as a chorus of Céciles sing in harmony: “I lost my mind/can you help me/find my mind.” It’s more than a little eerie, and the tension builds as Cécile calls wordlessly above the din, until once more things turn and we are hearing what seems to be a French organ symphony, til that too cuts out and we are left in silence.

“Moon Song” is a considerably more traditional original, with Cécile singing a song of unrequited yearning accompanied only by the piano trio. The melody and arrangement are a moment for breathing deep and reveling in Cécile’s immaculate phrasing. We get another moment of respite next, with the piano original “Trail Mix”—but here it’s Cécile herself at the keys, giving us a tune that seems to follow a team of mules that refuse to walk in time with each other down a bumpy dirt road. She has written about the track: “I was messing around on the piano and Sullivan Fortner heard me and said, ‘You should record that.’ It was a green light from one of my favorite musicians, and even though I’ve never recorded a song where I’m just playing the piano, it ended up being fun and it lightened the record up a little bit. It is me pushing myself to do something that I’ve never done before, and if this album is a diary, then it would not be complete without ‘Trail Mix’ in it.”

Cécile has made songs from Kurt Weill, including “The World is Mean,” otherwise known as the first-act finale from The Threepenny Opera, staples of her live shows. Her performance on the recording has all the hallmarks of her genius for interpretation—the rapid-fire diction, lyrical intensity and total absorption into the character, here tinged with more than a little humor. The band gives it closing number intensity right up to the end, when it seems to segue seamlessly into “Dead People”—no small feat given that the latter song is an out-of-time melancholy love letter that seems to be almost out of love. Here Salvant set a love letter from Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keeffe to music, wanting to memorialize the vivid visual writing as well as to pay homage to both artists.

Cécile’s “Thunderclouds” might be the most direct acknowledgment of the pandemic on the record, as she seeks conscious gratitude for even the frightening and difficult things in the world. “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky,” she repeats over and over on the bridge. The track ends with a brief coda from the children’s chorus, this time singing in French.

Then we arrive at “Unquiet Grave.” A song of the living seeking the dead in a graveyard, it feels as ancient and fresh as any other Child ballad (the text is Child #78) and is sung fully a cappella, shifting from full and present to a voice being enveloped in ghostly echoes, as the dead love tells her grieving living paramour: “The stalk is withered dry, my love/So must our hearts decay/So make yourself content, my love/‘Til death takes you away.” It is the mirror image of “Wuthering Heights”’ tale of the ghostly lover who comes back to haunt Heathcliff, and apparently the two were originally recorded as one song. Salvant has said that it was important that the album end with the entreaty that the living should forget the dead and continue to embrace life.

More than any other recording in her catalog to this point, Ghost Song showcases the astonishingly fearless side of Cécile McLorin Salvant’s artistic identity and presents a cohesive artistic statement that blends ghost stories, personal narrative, covers and originals into a potent brew. She wasn’t satisfied to leave it here, either; next week we’ll go even further afield with her on her most recent recording.

You can listen to this week’s album here: