Cécile McLorin Salvant's Orchestra Album Is a Realized Dream
The jazz vocalist's new record With Every Breath I Take, made with the Metropole Orkest, is both intimate and sweeping.
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When Cécile McLorin Salvant called into the interview, the first question came back to her in French: "Should we speak French or should we speak English?" Her answer was swift: "No. As you wish. What language is the article going to be in?" French. "Eh bien alors, parlons français."
It's her first language, after all — daughter of a Haitian physician and a French mother who ran an immersion school in Miami, Salvant is American only through the accident of choral geography. Her new album With Every Breath I Take, recorded over two intense days with the Dutch Metropole Orkest under conductor Jules Buckley, feels like a dream made tangible.
The session footage for "Left Over," the album's only original composition, captures something nearly miraculous: Salvant at the piano, surrounded by orchestra as though it were an extension of her own heart. "There's a moment where you feel that you're going to make something together," she said, switching to English in her excitement. "And that's not just me and the orchestra. It's me, the orchestra, the trio musicians, conductor Darcy James Argue who did the arrangements, Todd Whitelock capturing the sound, even those turning the video. Being all working toward that goal — that's quite an experience."
For a composition like "Left Over," where there's so much rubato, the stakes are high. "The take is the take. We have to go with what we have. We have to be in the moment, a real moment," she said.
Across nine albums released almost without pause since 2010, Salvant has always written one song per project — a signature. On this record, she threads Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Barbara Song" alongside Les Parapluies de Cherbourg from Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand. No Great American Songbook safety — instead, songs that have mattered across her life.
"I chose really by instinct, especially songs that are ultra-important in my life," she explained. "Songs my mother played when I was small, one I sang at my sister's wedding, songs I learned with my first jazz teacher that, finally, 20 years later, I understand a bit better. There are songs that make me think of people I've lost. Every time I sing them, I think of them."