Fresh from winning her second Best Jazz Vocal Grammy this year for Dreams and Daggers following her first two years earlier (For One to Love) Cécile McLorin Salvant is no longer the “next big thing” – at the age of 28, she has become it!
And now she returns to McCarter with her latest project, focused on a suite of her own songs for a band of eclectic instruments arranged and conducted by Darcy James Argue of Princeton’s Jazz Studies Program. Salvant sees her role as that of a griot, with her songs focusing on identity and the evolution of women in nature.
Through composition, storytelling, and song, she continues to broaden her footprint on the world’s cultural landscape. She describes Ogresse with the following lines: “A woman lived in the woods on the outskirts of town. Her skin was chocolate brown. Upon her head she wore a crown of bones.”
