Month: August 2024

Cannonball Adderley Quintet, In Chicago

Album of the Week, August 31, 2024

Julian Edwin “Cannonball” Adderley surely has the best nickname (and the best nickname story) of almost any jazz musician. The story goes that as an elementary school student, he had such a voracious appetite that the other kids in the class called him a “cannonball”—aka a cannibal. Either version of the name seems appropriate; hearing him on stage barreling through his solos, he sounds both as though he’s been launched into orbit, and as though he’s hungry for more.

We’ve heard Adderley before, but always in the company of Miles Davis—whether on the great trumpeter’s best known album as part of his sextet, or on an album that, while issued under Adderley’s name, was really a Miles session. But Adderley was very much a bandleader in his own right, and a month before he entered the studio with Miles to start recording Kind of Blue, he was playing this session in Chicago with many of the same musicians. The rhythm section featured Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums, with Wynton Kelly on piano (who would substitute for Bill Evans on “Freddie Freeloader”). The second horn player was none other than John Coltrane, whose name is added to modern versions of the album (like my copy) but who was here strictly as a sideman. Together they entered a Chicago studio on February 3, 1959; all of them would head into the Columbia studio on 30th Street in New York City on March 2 to record with Davis.

For coming so close before the landmark recording, there’s little of the modal masterpiece around the quintet here. Instead, we get a solid serving of straight-ahead jazz, starting with “Limehouse Blues.” The old British show hall tune gets a conventional reading right up until the end of the first chorus, when Adderley takes a flying run up into the stratosphere. In his solo he lays out a melodic trail that Trane, at first, refuses to follow, staying in the lower range of the tenor to emphasize the contrast between the two horns. But before long they’re both playing full out, in “sheets of sound” style, and the battle is a spectacular indication of just how talented both players were—especially as they trade fours at the end of the solos. The rhythm section is full out trying to keep up with the two of them, and Jimmy Cobb in particular eggs them on.

We’re in bluesier territory for “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Adderley’s blue playing is said to have been what led Davis to invite him to join his group, and it’s on full display here (Trane sits this one out). You can almost smell the smoke in the air, particularly in the second verse as he solos above the restrained sound of the rhythm section, here just a little bit of the high hat and Kelly comping the chords beneath. When Kelly gets his solo, he displays the versatility that would bring him into Davis’ band before leaving for a career leading this rhythm section as a trio; the melody gets a gentle airing before he takes it into higher realms, singing alongside in a manner not unlike Keith Jarrett’s style years later.

Adderley seems to have had quite the sense of humor about his nickname, as his composition “Wabash” suggests. The tune has flavors of a country dance and a 1950s sock hop rolled into one, but the solos are pure post-bop, especially Trane’s soaring flight above the chords. His descent down the scale in the second verse of his solo is breathtaking but almost insouciant, practically thrown away. He’s holding back the more dizzying blowouts that characterized his own works at the time; this session came less than two months before the first sessions for Giant Steps, but there’s little to betray what he would soon unleash. We get a great pizzicato solo from Chambers to round out the track.

“Grand Central,” one of two Trane originals on the album, gives us the feeling of being in the middle of the train station with the minor key melody which plays in parallel fourths between the horns. Adderley leads off with a fiery solo that explores the scaffolding that the chords build around the melodic line. Trane’s solo is a slower exploration of the lower end, at least until it bursts free into a flurry of arpeggios at the end. By comparison, Kelly’s solo is a more restrained statement, playing for just one chorus until the horns return to close out the track.

Trane gets a solo ballad statement on “You’re a Weaver of Dreams,” more in the spirit of the energetic ballads on Coltrane’s Sound than his more romantic sound heard on Lush Life. But it’s still a gorgeous sound, and one that’s over too soon. There are compensations aplenty, though, on the original closing track,“The Sleeper.” The other Trane original features a cockeyed minor key melody that has a built-in pause, as though the pianist falls asleep partway through! Trane and Adderley trade arpeggios over the rhythm section, which displays some of Kelly’s more soulful tendencies as he leans into blue notes throughout. Adderley gets the last word with an extended solo that extends over into the final chorus.

There have been a number of reissues of this album over the years; my copy, a 2010 European reissue, features Leroy Anderson’s “Serenata” as a bonus track. Recorded after Kind of Blue, on April 27, 1959 (five days after the second and last session), this is a quartet number with no Coltrane. Adderley’s playing is jaunty throughout with more than a hint of soul jazz throughout, foreshadowing the direction he would later take his groups of the 1960s.

In fact, Adderley’s best years were ahead of him. His early 1960s groups were stars, thanks in large part to the soul jazz originals penned by his new pianist, Bobby Timmons. He continued to play up until his unexpected death in 1975, at the age of 46. But he never played with Miles again following Kind of Blue. Next week we’ll hear how Miles’ group had evolved by 1960, with some of these same players plus a new saxophonist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Retrogaming and retro-disking in Rome

I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole this weekend, thanks to an online index of Open Source Game Clones—basically, freely available re-implementations of old paid games. The first game I looked up was Caesar III, which was one of a few games (along with Marathon and Myst) that I played a lot on nights that Lisa was attending grad school classes, in our apartment in McLean, Virginia. It’s a city building game that allowed you to experiment with, as my college friend attorney Tim Fox would say, zoning. Namely — if you make streets too long, if you fail to build adequate agriculture or mercantile or entertainment options, your city fails to thrive and stand up against invasion.

Lo and behold, Caesar III has a few open source clone projects, of which one, Augustus, is an active project with a Mac port. So I went to check it out. Like Devilution, Augustus emulates the engine of the game — the actual Mac application that runs the game, takes input, handles saves, etc. It does not attempt to recreate the original game assets (art, storylines, music); instead, it requires you to provide them.

I actually still have my original Caesar III CD-ROM, but found that I couldn’t get it to read with my Mac’s SuperDrive. That, it turns out, is because modern Macs can no longer read HFS file systems, which many CD-ROMs meant to be read by Macs in the 1990s used. HFS was replaced by HFS Plus in 1998, which is still supported today, but if you have old media (floppies or CDs) formatted with HFS, you can’t read them with modern drives—at least, not without the help of additional software.

I explored a couple options to get access to the disk (as well as a few other disks that were in the same binder). All options required using the Mac Disk Utility to create a disk image (.DMG) file from the CD-ROM. Once done, you can then find software to read the image. One option that seemed promising was a set of command line utilities called hfsutils, which can be installed via Homebrew and which promised access to mount and access HFS-formatted disk images. But you need to be very precise with the commands to copy these files and I couldn’t figure out a way to work with them other than one at a time. (There is, of course, a way, using the -f flag and the wildcard, but I didn’t find that until later.)

Enter a most useful utility, Kevin Brewster’s HFS. It is very simple: drag an HFS formatted disk image onto the app window and tell it where to save the files. And it works! … Except… it copied the Mac installer out, which Augustus can’t use, and I couldn’t get the installer to run from within my Classic Mac emulation environment.

So I went to plan B. It turns out that you can buy the Windows version of Caesar III on GOG for about $6, and Augustus can use those game files. So now I’m up and running again, and re-learning all the frustrating bits of Roman zoning law.

But the exploration of HFS utilities wasn’t wasted time. I think the HFS utility will turn out to be a great way to get content off old floppies… and that’ll be the next project.

Miles Davis, Bags Groove

Album of the Week, August 24, 2024

When we began listening to Miles over two years ago, we touched on the heroin addiction that nearly derailed his career just as it was starting. We then jumped ahead to 1955 when he began recording a series of pivotal albums for Prestige that led to his fame and fortune (and a bigger contract at Columbia). But starting at the beginning of 1954, Miles was coming back, having gotten clean from his addiction and recording newly disciplined and interesting music. Prestige released the results on 10″ LPs, and then, following Miles’ departure for Columbia, reissued them on 12″ records.

Two of those sessions, recorded June 29 and December 24, 1954 in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, make up Bags Groove (the brilliant typographic album cover by Reid Miles omits the apostrophe, ducking the question of how to do a proper possessive, and I reluctantly follow suit). The players are a pretty significant who’s who. The first session (on side 2 of the record) includes Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, while the second (side 1) features Thelonious Monk and “Bags” himself, Milt Jackson, on vibes. All tracks feature Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke, a year away from expatriating to Paris, on drums.

“Bags Groove” comes in two versions, marking the first time in this blog series that we’ve run across a classic jazz LP that actually includes an alternate take. Both takes lean toward the “cool” side of Miles’ early repertoire, thanks to Jackson’s modal introduction and Miles’ Harmon mute. The liner notes by Ira Gitler say that Miles asked Monk to lay out during his solo, which must have aggrieved Monk to no end! But Monk does as asked; in the second take he drops out for the entirety of Miles’ solo, re-entering behind Milt Jackson, where he subversively adds different and unexpected chords until Bags himself drops out and Monk takes over. Hearing Monk do his thing has to be the principle pleasure of this arrangement, in fact, aside from the fluency of Miles’ solo over what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward 12-bar blues.

The numbers with Sonny Rollins are a different story. Sonny was apparently writing compositions on scraps of paper during the June 29 session, and three of his most enduring and most-covered compositions are the result. “Airegin” (“Nigeria” spelled backwards) has more than a little of the feel of “A Night in Tunisia” in the introduction, but it pretty swiftly shifts to its own thing—not yet as volcanic as it would be in another year with Miles and Trane on Cookin’, but a pretty hot groove nonetheless. The tempo is ever so slightly more relaxed here, perhaps in part due to Percy Heath, whose walking bass line sounds like it doesn’t want to be hurried.

That same sense of relaxed groove permeates the Charlie Parker-like “Oleo,” which again is a much more laid back take than that which the First Great Quintet would record on Relaxin’. But don’t tell Sonny; he and Monk get into some understated interplay during his solo, and there’s even a great moment where he single-handedly alters the chords on his way out of the solo with just one note. Monk is a little less demonstrative in this number, perhaps because no one told him not to play!

The sole standard on this session, “But Not For Me” appears in two takes, with take 2 first. Thanks to Monk, we don’t get a straight ballad, but a sort of wink at one; he doesn’t seem to accompany the other players as much as he comments on them. Rollins’ solo is a rollicking one, with more than a little swagger in its swing as he works in bits of “Doxy” into the second verse of his solo.

Speaking of “Doxy,” the third of the great Rollins standards here, Gitler calls out the “funky” character of the music; I’d prefer to call it “suggestive,” in a slightly exaggerated Mae West-style “come up and see me sometime” spirit. Interestingly, Rollins’ own solo is the only one that doesn’t feature any intimations of either hanky or panky.

We close with “But Not For Me (Take 1)”; are we suggesting that the doxy is not for us? Here the repetition of the performance is OK with me as the solos are anything but repetitive. Miles in particular takes a unique approach to the rhythm of his solo, playing a sly hemiola before dropping completely out of the last bar before Rollins picks things up. Monk is less oblique here than on Take 2, playing an unusually straight ahead solo before he develops into the idea of commenting on the other players on the last chorus. It’s a solid ending to a solid session.

Bags Groove gives us a great window into Miles the bandleader before he put his first great band together, as we get a fascinating glimpse of what an alternate quintet might have looked like (imagine Thelonious Monk on Milestones!). Next time we’ll check on some of the players that did become part of that quintet, and the one who made it a sextet, in a live setting.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

PS – A note on collecting vinyl: Sometimes you get lucky. I didn’t set out to find a copy of the 1958 second pressing of this early Miles set earlier this summer, but when I walked into the antique shop in western Massachusetts it was right there, and to my delight it was gorgeous and beautifully playable.

What’s next for the #albumoftheweek?

I was trying to figure out what I should write about after wrapping up our series on Johnny Hartman, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Kurt Elling, and it occurred to me that there were probably a few Miles Davis and Miles-adjacent records that had entered my collection since I did my series on the great trumpeter starting over two years ago.

I checked and there are more than a “few”; between Miles and his sidemen, I have enough to keep us going for a while. But why revisit ground I’ve already covered? Turns out there are a few reasons.

First, there are a few sidemen who merit a second look; we’ll get to one of those early in the project.

Second, there are projects by some of Miles’ sidemen (and by Miles himself) that are too outstanding not to cover, though I didn’t own them on vinyl when I was writing the series. Likewise, there are some fascinating twists and turns in their discographies that make for fun listening. Somehow those records have newly turned up in my collection, so I thought it would be fun to listen.

Third, I cut off the series with Miles going electric, but his sidemen kept going, and I think it’s interesting to talk about the music they made as they got older and the musicians they made the music with.

So get ready to talk about some musicians we’ve discussed before in some new places and new (and old) records! And after this series? Well, there are some very fun connections that will take us into types of music I haven’t reviewed yet as part of this project, so stay tuned.

Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter, SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree

Album of the Week, August 17, 2024

Sometimes a jazz record is as deep as the ocean, and sometimes it’s just fun. And sometimes, it can be deeply fun! Such has been the case with the music Kurt Elling has been releasing under the “SuperBlue” moniker. Started as a pandemic project, an initially virtual collaboration between Elling and Charlie Hunter, with DJ Harrison and Corey Fonville, the project appears to have taken on a life of its own and has seen a few releases. This week, as we (for now) wrap up this summer of jazz vocal music, we check in on the most recent release, 2023’s The Iridescent Spree.

Just because the music is fun doesn’t mean it has to be shallow. “Black Crow,” a cover of a Joni Mitchell tune from her 1976 album Hejira, definitely proves the point. Mitchell had increasingly moved in a jazz direction during the 1970s, and this cover returns the favor, reconfiguring the intense heat of the original into a cooler burbling groove. This is not Elling diving deeply into the psychodrama of a song; here he joyfully scats over the last verse until it abruptly ends, transitioning into “Freeman Square,” a Don Was tune with lyrics by Elling. If there’s a thesis statement for the album, it might be the closing chorus: “Unless you’re Miles Davis there’s always some brother / Some mother smoother than you./So don’t you worry ‘bout a thing. You’ve got plenty of bells to ring/Bring that bad thing you bring & swing on down to Freeman Square.” Elling swings hard here but it sounds effortlessly cool.

“Naughty Number Nine” might be familiar to aficionados of both composer Bob Dorough and Schoolhouse Rock—the original version can be watched on YouTube and is also part of the Multiplication Rock album. Here it’s a slightly boozy blues in 6 with a killer horn section and a hipper than hip vocal from Elling, echoing the brilliant original from drummer Grady Tate.

“Little Fairy Carpenter,” one of the full originals on the record, is a slow moving ballad that lets Elling stretch out a bit. “Finally life is hanging by a thread… the hourglass sands have run through your hands… your deadline calls you to fold or expand,” Elling’s narrator sings, returning to the carpe diem theme of earlier originals. The difference here is the brilliant harmony that Elling overdubs onto those chorus vocals, and the overall laid-back vibe that gives one the impression that he’s not just musically inclined but reclined (to steal a gag from an old Scooby Doo episode).

The side ends on an upbeat note. “Bounce It” made its debut as an instrumental track on the SuperBlue: Guilty Pleasures EP that accompanied the limited edition version of this record; this version adds lyrics and a certain cockeyed velocity to the seriously funky backing track (complete with horns).

“Only the Lonely Woman” invokes Ornette Coleman’s most famous ballad, with a sympathetic vocalese written by Elling atop skittering drums and atmospheric keys. “She’s just a lonely woman, hollowed out in despair,” he sings of an imagined woman in the throes of anguish; Coleman’s music, a show-stopping melody in any rendition, is the real star here.

“Right About Now,” a Ron Sexsmith tune from his 1999 album Whereabouts, is a faithful cover down to tempo and spareness of accompaniment; the original, as with many of Sexsmith’s tunes, needed little dressing up. This is blue-eyed soul, or at least blue-eyed R&B, at its most achingly desperate, and Elling does it justice.

“Not Here / Not Now” is a regretfully funky “no thank you,” as Elling informs a prospective partner that “though it’s clear / that we are smashing in a parallel sphere… there’s a price we’d pay for desire / so with regret / I’d better leave you with a quick goombye.” It’s less of a diss than “Can’t Make It With Your Mind” from SuperBlue, but it’s a “no thank you” nonetheless.

“The Afterlife” closes the album with a spoken word moment, as Elling narrates Billy Collins’ 1990 poem over a deeply funky groove. Elling returns here again to the subject of mortality and the regret that comes too late: “They wish they could wake in the morning like you/and stand at a window examining the winter trees…” But again, the main thing here is the groove, not the dead, and the song closes the album in this downtempo contemplation of the eternal.

Elling possesses a smoky voice, a deep groove and a voracious intellect, and sometimes his records lead more toward one of those three poles. In The Iridescent Spree, we get something approaching a balance, and a funky one, as we think about mortality even as the band has us chair-dancing. We may lean more into this balance between wit and rhythm in the not too far distant future; what is certain is that next week will be completely different.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

P.S. Here’s the bonus EP, Guilty Pleasures, which I recommend listening to with your mind wide open and your smile wider.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine

Album of the Week, August 10, 2024

If you’re going to listen to Cécile McLorin Salvant, and (as you can tell following my reviews of Ghost Song and her earlier albums) I highly recommend it, and you don’t speak French, you have to decide how to approach an album like Mélusine, which is entirely sung in French except for one song in English, another in Occitan (aka Provençal), and some in Haitian Kreyol. My recommendation: just listen. Her phrasing is impeccable; her vocal technique flawless, and she can catch you unawares in French just as she does in English. And then, after you’ve listened, find a good translation of the lyrics, and fall down the rabbit hole.

Mélusine refers to the legend of a woman cursed by her mother to turn into a half snake every Saturday, and the man who, distrusting her request for privacy on her reptile days, batters down the door only to see her become a dragon and fly away. As a metaphor—for the life of an immigrant, for the bitter failure of men and women to create authentic trust —it’s a rich one. This album, with its DNA half in jazz, half in French chanteuserie, seems another example of the metaphor. Also the personnel; the album opens with a pair straight ahead trio tracks with her first trio (Aaron Diehl, Paul Sikivie, and even an appearance by the late Lawrence Leathers on drums alongside Kyle Poole), and continues into more adventurous fare with Sullivan Fortner on piano and a seemingly never-ending set of combinations of Weedie Braimah on percussion, Luques Curtis on bass, Obed Calvaire on drums, Godwin Louis on alto sax and whistle, and Daniel Swenberg on guitar.

The album accordingly ranges across different moods and styles. “Est-Ce Ainsi Que Les Hommes Vivent?,” made famous by Yves Montand, here aches with despair but is given its heart by Cécile’s amazing voice, particularly in the chorus when her tone becomes pure and true. Aaron Diehl’s piano is similarly miraculous ranging from a rocking rhythm to twinkling stars to discordant bells within a few short moments. The band is similarly fluent on “La Route Enchantée,” bringing a subtle rhythm and a not-so-subtle joy to the Charles Trenet song.

Things go further afield on “Il M’a Vue Nue,” literally “he saw me all nude.” The song is given a jaunty cheerfulness by the whistling opening and winking narration, as well as the interchange between the rock solid drums and gently syncopated piano. “Dites Moi Que Je Suis Belle” shifts gears into a more percussive world; accompanied only by Weedie Braimah’s precise djembe, Salvant interprets the Yvette Guibert adaptation of Jules Massenet’s lyric from Thaïs with a kind of yearning demand: “tell me I am beautiful! Say I shall be lovely until the end of time!”

“Doudou,” a Salvant original, carries more than a hint of the Afro-Latin about it and is enlivened by both Godwin Louis’s saxophone and the New Orleans flavored percussion. Salvant has been performing this since 2017 when she premiered it with Wynton Marsalis at Marciac, and there are clearly elements of the original arrangement at play here, but it has an element of lightness and playfulness in this reading, especially in the stacked harmony vocals and seamless shift into a slow four in the last chorus.

With “Petite Musique Terrienne,” originally performed by Fabienne Thibeault, we are alone with Salvant and Fortner, even as the former stacks harmonies on the chorus, joined by a synthesizer line from Fortner on the final “Who will tell us what we’re doing here/In this world that doesn’t look like us?” “Aida” has a similar construction on even slighter lyrics, and here it’s all Cécile on both vocals and keys.

Both songs serve as a kind of prelude to “Mélusine.” We’re in English, but we aren’t in a straightforward narrative. Are we the woman, forever turning into a half-snake in her Saturday bath? Are we the wondering, distrustful lover? The classical guitar doesn’t tell us; the retelling of the Mélusine story in French in the last verse only adds to the mystery of the two worlds colliding.

“Wedo” is all Cécile again, the beat of a children’s song telling the very unchildish Voudoun tale of Ayida-Wedo, the half-male, half-female serpent that with her husband Damballa crossed from Africa to Haiti to bring the religion of the loa to the new world. The song rings out like an echo of “Mélusine,” telling the same story in a different time and language. “D’un feu secret” gives us Cécile in her purest tones, untouched by nasalized French vowels, even as Fortner’s synthesizer brings its squelchiest tones. The secret of Mélusine, she sings, is unknowable: “When we know… it will be well known that I have ceased to live.”

“Le temps est assassin,” originally performed by Véronique Sanson, is performed as a straightforward ballad singing an unstraightforward lyric: “Sometimes I feel the mysteries of all these things I can’t get my head around… I say that time is an assassin, and I don’t want anything anymore.” The death of desire and the duality of Mélusine and Aida Wedo flying—out the window, from Africa to Haiti—entwine together in “Fenestra,” which returns to the gently calypso-flavored rhythms of “Doudou,” finally begins to dig into the mysteries: “As for the women who seduced their angels, they will become sirens.” And the different strands of the record entwine into a single syncretic whole as we embrace the rhythm, the brilliant piano, the Haitian folk tales, the older European legends, all together given voice by Salvant.

The ending gives us a pair of mysteries: “Domna N’almucs,” originally by Iseut Da Capio, the voices of two Occitan noblewomen in dialog from medieval times (a scholarly paper talks about the substance of the exchange, with one woman asking the other to forgive her lover), accompanied by a subtle wash of synthesizers. And “Dame Iseut” returns us once more to the islands for a brief epilogue in Haitian Kreyol.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, at the beginning of her career, told stories through song. Now, after Grammy awards and a Genius Grant, she takes us on journeys across musical styles, time and space, personal and mythic, all in that magnificent voice. I’m looking forward to the next one when it comes out. But next week we’ll close out (for now) this series on jazz vocalists with one more from Kurt Elling.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

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.

Jordan Hall in February 2020, before Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner took the stage.

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: