Cecile McLorin Salvant – “Dreams and Daggers” – Available September 29

GRAMMY® Award-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant has had a remarkable rise to stardom in her professional career, and she’s taking another big leap forward with Dreams and Daggers, her third album for Mack Avenue Records, available September 29.

“The songs on this album are of dreams and daggers. The daggers have been used at times to attack, at times to defend. For power, no doubt, to take it, to keep it. The dreams are the ones I caught looking out a window, or from the light sleep before the deep. I don’t always know what they mean, but they are the ones I was able to keep. And yet dreams can be desires too. I wrote them down to make them true. That we may bring our wildness into view. That we may be unruled and unruly,” explains McLorin Salvant.

 

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“You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.” – Wynton Marsalis

 

“Salvant has a supple, well-trained voice with spot-on pitch.

(No vibrato-teases; no meandering warbles passing as melisma.)

Her low notes go from husky to full-bodied; her high notes float purely

and cleanly. When she scats, it’s not an ego trip but a musical game, where

notes and syllables get to shape-shift.” – The New York Times Magazine

 

“She had emotional range, too, inhabiting different personas in the

course of a song, sometimes even a phrase—delivering the lyrics in

a faithful spirit while also commenting on them, mining them for

unexpected drama and wit.” — The New Yorker

 

“As Cécile McLorin Salvant spun songs into a brilliant silk tapestry, I thought,

if anyone can extend the lineage of the Big Three — Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan,

and Ella Fitzgerald — it is this…virtuoso.” – The New York Times

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In 2013, McLorin Salvant made her Mack Avenue Records debut with WomanChild, garnering a GRAMMY® Award-nomination, NPR Music’s pick for “Best Jazz Vocal Album of the Year,” and three placements in DownBeat’s critic’s poll as “Jazz Album of the Year,” “Top Female Vocalist,” and “Best Female Jazz Up and Coming Artist of the Year,” among many other accolades. Her 2015 follow up release, For One To Love, won the GRAMMY® Award for “Best Jazz Vocal Album.”

McLorin Salvant’s music has been featured in multiple Chanel “Chance” campaigns and is included in the soundtrack for HBO’s acclaimed film, Bessie. New York Times Magazine included her recording of “Trolley Song” as one of “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going,” The New Yorker profiled her at age 27, Vanity Fair featured her in their “Millennials That Are Shaking Up The Jazz World” piece, Essence Magazine noted her as one of “13 Emerging Black Women in Music,” and Gilles Peterson included her as an “Artist to Watch” in The Atlantic. Learn more about McLorin Salvant on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Fresh Air,” New York Times’ “Close at Hand,” or watch her perform on BBC’s “Later… with Jools Holland” and PBS’ “The Tavis Smiley Show.”