REVIEW: Vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant Unites Early Music and Jazz with Astounding Finesse

If I were a gambler, I would not hesitate to bet money on SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan bringing back jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant for future SummerFest performances. Her thrilling Saturday SummerFest concert marked her fourth festival appearance since her 2019 SummerFest debut, the year Barnatan became the festival’s Music Director.

Although Salvant is usually described as a jazz singer, that label is much too narrow. She has studied both jazz and Baroque opera performance practice and has managed to integrate these two seemingly disparate genres into her vocal technique. On Saturday at The Conrad, for example, she started Purcell’s celebrated aria from The Indian Queen “I attempt from Love’s sickness to fly” and  John Dowland’s lute song “Flow not so fast, ye fountaines” with that demure vocal style that is approved by serious followers of historical performance practice. Then in each song an Edith Piaf sigh crept in, followed by a Sarah Vaughan portamento, and soon Salvant had modulated into he own dynamic contemporary jazz-influenced vocal mode.

She owns the whole of her vocal technique, and combined with her equally flexible five-person band, she has the gamut of western music history covered. Her keyboard player  Sullivan Fortner is equally at home on harpsichord, piano, and digital keyboard. Her lutenist Dušan Balarin and traverse flutist Emi Ferguson lean to the early music side of the musical fence, while bassist Yasushi Nakamura and percussion guru Keita Ogawa lean to the jazz end of the spectrum. As an ensemble, however, they fuse genres with breath-taking assurance and are nothing less than entrancing.

Salvant included some of her own compositions on the concert, notably “Obligation” and “Second Guessing.” Her style suggests a vocalized conversation of short, pointed accusations that bounce along a nervous but insistent instrumental basso continuo that I imagine how G. P. Telemann might have sounded had he been an East Village hipster.

In Salvant’s account of the French courtly ayre “Objet dont les charmes si doux,” Fortner’s stylish harpsichord accompaniment securely grounded its early music roots, and in another Dowland lute song, “If music be the food of Love,” Ferguson’s exuberant flute elaboration uplifted its modest strophic melody.

Salvant concluded her concert with her dramatic evocation of the familiar closing scene from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas that features Dido’s lament “When I am laid in earth,” which Salvant brought into a contemporary vocal intensity that John Adams would surely recognize.

Her encores included the aria “Sento un certo non so che” from Claudio Monteverdi’s opera  L’incoronazione di Poppea.  

This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest 2025 at The Conrad in downtown La Jolla on August 16, 2025.