Indeed, onstage, Salvant appears larger than her form, employing not just her unmistakable, scale-sailing, velvety voice, but the full force of her body, from dramatic arm gestures to the flicker of eyelids, to physically inhabit whatever song she is singing. A storytelling bard theatrically excavating ancient and contemporary lyrics of love, loss, lust and revenge, resuscitating them to nerve-shredding life. A critic once described her as a “postmodern cabaret singer”, a term she emphatically approves of. “Jazz is such a maligned genre, anyway. Over the course of my teenage years popular TV shows would make fun of jazz, no one likes it at large – so,” she muses, “I kind of love it.”

Salvant’s command of the stage is so memorable, it’s an account of her performing “If This Isn’t Love” at New York’s 88-year-old Village Vanguard – a song written in 1946 and made famous by 50s icon Sarah Vaughan – that opens Playing the Changes, an excellent collection of essays by former NPR critic Nate Chinen arguing the vital, insistent claim that jazz has entered a newly fertile period of relevance and creativity in the 21st century. “Salvant shows she’s neither wrestling with ghosts nor shouldering the weight of obligation,” writes the author. “Rather than evoke the past from a stance of decorum of deference, Salvant is bent on stirring it up with sly intellectual rigour.”

Indeed, it’s difficult to square Chinen’s account – or the larger-than-life character I saw on stage at Tennessee’s Big Ears festival at the end of March, six weeks ahead of our interview – with the relatively introverted, mere mortal in front of me on Zoom. (“A super honour,” quips Salvant about her placement in the book. “I didn’t know there was anything to even make note of. I’m just out here doing it, it was wild and great.”)

Doing it, she is – both wild and great. Salvant makes singing a form of collective communication, a communal rite – it’s no coincidence that she comes from nurturing parents who were not afraid to tear things up before starting again. Her French mother lived in Africa, South America and the Caribbean before settling in Miami, Florida, where she founded an immersive language school; her dad, a doctor, left his native Haiti to practise as a doctor. Raised between cultures, Salvant sings equally powerfully and regularly in English and French, as well as employing Spanish and, lately, Haitian Creole and Occitan, a medieval language spoken in the South of France.

“I was brought up by travellers, by multilingual people, curious people – people who all taught themselves English when they got to America – foreigners,” she says, with an emphasis that glorifies rather than disparages the term. “Adaptable people, people who have seen and experienced many, many different cultures in their lives, [so I gained] the culture that comes back from those travels, and the appreciation for art, and not just art but folk art, and folk music from all over the world.”

She praises her mother’s restless craftiness – a student of ancient handicrafts, French bobbin lace and carpentry alike – and her sister’s “wild, crazy and surrealist” visual art as creative fuel.

Salvant’s own artistry is not just that of the musician or entertainer but, mirroring her role in the family unit as a first generation child, as an interpreter and translator. “I was shaped with this thing of translating, of understanding how to speak to people who don’t fully understand what you’re saying,” she says. “This hybridity was really enriching. I was brought up in an environment where it was encouraged to be curious, to be autodidactic, to teach oneself things. There was just a lot of creativity bursting everywhere and I was really lucky to be brought up around people who did things with their hands, and did it just for the sake of doing it.”

Savant made her own geographical departure, moving at the age of 18 to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study both law (a career backup?), as well as classical and baroque voice at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud – tidy supporting evidence to the “postmodern cabaret” tag. “I apply a lot of that to how I sing – I do more ornamentation than the improvisation that a jazz singer would do,” she adds. “I don’t scat.”

Shortly after returning to the States, she won the prestigious annual Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Award in 2010 at the age of 21 – only the fourth vocalist to do so in the honour’s then-23-year history. (The event was renamed the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Competition in 2019.) Three years later, she came out with major-label debut WomanChild, and her coronation came with subsequent outings For One to Love (2015) and the sprawling live set Dreams and Daggers (2017) – both Grammy winners for best jazz vocal album.

While a dozen or so original songs are littered across these career-making collections, Salvant’s reputation was built, live and on record, in the time-old tradition of reinterpreting existing material – treading through the standards songbook that has defined so much of post-war jazz, most often backed by the classic configuration of drums, bass and piano. “I’ve never sung super-famous standards – I would pick songs based on how much I loved them, and preferably how few people recorded them,” she protests. “There’s no ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, I’m not doing ‘My Funny Valentine’.”

Instead, she compares her curatorial role to that of a DJ – particularly a “Belgium popcorn” DJ of the 80s. “The currency was, how deep is the deep cut of doo-wop tunes you’re DJing?” she says. “I love that kind of thing – here’s something that’s out of print, that no one’s heard of, let’s discover it together. It’s like going into the library and looking in the back and rummaging through the dusty books and finding something really beautiful – that’s something that’s such a joy to me that I never want to stop doing.”

The album took a long time to finish, but was recorded in less than 10 days over a six-month period in 2020. (“Most of that half year was spent at home watching TV and Netflix,” says Salvant.) But the pandemic-era vinyl shortage delayed the release until March 2022. “Now it feels rather old,” she adds, “and some of the things I was hesitating to do and was scared to do – should I do a Kate Bush song, is that crazy? – now that feels so run of the mill to me.”

The pandemic was both a blessing and curse for Salvant. Despite obvious frustrations, after a decade of relentless touring, it presented the opportunity for creative renewal. “It was weird, but I didn’t mind it so much because I got to make things and be creative in ways that I hadn’t really experienced before – everything, art, music, whatever, just dilly-dallying creatively with various things, and not having an audience to think about,” she muses. “I have a tendency to want to please people a lot, and suddenly the people were gone, so it was just me pleasing myself, and making things for fun and out of playfulness, out of exploration and experimentation … while it felt like there was an apocalypse going on outside.”

Self-identifying as a “people pleaser” might generally carry a cloud of neurosis and negativity, but for a performer, sending away a happy audience is a necessary part of the job description. Professional artists are required to balance the raw, uncompromising instincts that produce genuinely inventive, personal work, and the demands of the audience that sustains their livelihood. “That [instinct] is baked into my personality,” admits Salvant. “When I perform live and people are coming to hear me, I want everyone to have a good time and I don’t want anyone to be bored, and I think that’s positive – but also those [instincts] can be traps when you’re trying to be creative. It sometimes feels like those two desires can’t coexist, or there’s a balance to be found between the two.”

Arguably, that balance found a happy equilibrium with this year’s Mélusine, a concept album of sorts gathering many of the French chanson and art songs that have formed part of her live repertoire for years. What unites them, though, is a guiding narrative arc Salvant has constructed, or rather repurposed, from the French folkloric legend of a woman who turns into a half-snake on Saturdays, remembered in a story captured by Jean d’Arras in 1393, documenting the titular character’s marriage and eventually unmasking. Yet secretly sown into this ancient music was the most modern sonics of her career.

Before acquiring Logic, Salvant made her own pandemic home experiments with the super-primitive, entry-level (and free) GarageBand software. A handful of these “stupid GarageBand loopy things” ended up being smuggled into the finished album, short beat-driven tracks (“Aida”, “Wedo”, the spoken-word “Donna N’Almucs”) that somewhat seamlessly segue between the rest of Mélusine’s rootsy organic, live-band instrumentation. And then we’re back on the cable. “There’s always little clues in what I do for the next thing,” she adds. “In this last album there’s a few tracks that are my little GarageBand stupidities, where I was like wait, let’s use this, this could actually work – stop saying that things are silly, sometimes silly is good.”

A readily quoted reference point for these moments is Fiona Apple’s DIY home-recording experiments on widely feted 2020 masterpiece Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Salvant is quicker to praise its predecessor, The Idler Wheel, first encountered a decade earlier. “When I saw what she did with that album, I said, “Wow, you can do that?’ Firstly, the writing is so direct – none of that meandering vibe that you can have in some singer-songwriter stuff – it just punches you right in the face,” she remembers. “But also the production is insane – drums, percussion – it felt like a new level for her, like she was exploding into something different.”

One imagines Salvant is capable of the same explosive, iconoclastic feats, although something might be holding her back. “I kinda like the idea of going in and out and going deep into the tradition and maybe doing something super, super traditional and classic and inside – and also doing the most insane. It’s funny because there’s no laws, but somehow there are so many laws – and sometimes in fact there are, you have contracts that don’t allow you to do that,” she shares. You do? The record company has the power to do that? “Yeah, yeah yeah … ”

Midway through our call a delivery guy arrives with her dinner, a salmon wrap that surely must be getting cold by now. I hasten to wrap things up for her meal’s sake, but there’s one more thing Salvant wants to share: before signing out, she makes a point of turning on her camera, revealing her face popping up at the edge of the frame. There’s a reason that I struggle to grasp at first: she wants to show me how she’s been occupying her right-brain while we talk, holding up a meticulously cut-out, fringed paper heart – a symbol both of her warmth and openness, and the restless creativity that ceaselessly drives her.

Cécile McLorin Salvant performs nightly with Sullivan Fortner at Carlyle & Co., Hong Kong, June 21-24 (non-member enquiries to [email protected]); and at Tsuen Wan Town Hall at 3pm on June 25, tickets HK$280-580 from art-mate.net.