The multilingual vocal marvel will perform a genre-blurring concert here at La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest
Before she won three Grammy Awards as a jazz singer, the teenaged Cécile McLorin Salvant had many musical favorites — including the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, Pearl Jam, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. But it was vocal mavericks Kate Bush and Björk whose decidedly offbeat work helped inspire her blazing career path.
“I must have been 15 or 16,” recalled McLorin Salvant, 35, speaking from her New York home. “I was desperately trying to fit in and to be like the popular girls in school. My sister told me:’You’re weird, and it’s okay that you’re weird.’
“Around the same time, I discovered the music of Björk and Kate Bush. Talk about two weird girls who are celebrating that!
“Hearing them was the initial validation that it’s okay to be completely, fully yourself. Not only that, it’s great to be unique, to be unexpected, to be surprising.”
McLorin Salvant, also a successful visual artist, has won three Grammys for Best Jazz Vocal Album. In keeping with being unique, her seven albums are sharply distinct from each other. For her most recent, 2023’s “Mélusine,” she sang mostly in French and Haitian Creole.
In keeping with being unexpected, McLorin Salvant will perform classical, baroque, jazz and folk music with her band Saturday at the Baker-Baum Concert Hall as part of La Jolla Music Society’s 2025 SummerFest.
And in keeping with being surprising, one of the singer’s proudest accomplishments this summer was learning how to flip a knot in shuttle tatting, an intricate lacemaking technique.
McLorin Salvant, a longtime knitter and crocheter, is constantly pushing herself past boundaries in both art and music.
“Something that I’ve always adored about Cecile is her ability to cross genres in such a natural way and find inspiration in all of them,” said SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan.
‘I was dancing’
Her new album, “Oh Snap,” which comes out in September, is another example of McLorin Salvant defying expectations. While she’s admired for her singular interpretations of other people’s work, she wrote and originally recorded the songs on “Oh Snap” at home. Using the Garage Band app, drum loops and reverb, she created a varied collection of music that harks back to her youth in Miami.
“’Oh Snap’ was a way to reconnect with my intuition and my sense of play in making music,” McLorin Salvant said. “It’s tied to nostalgia, because the ultimate sense of play — the most playful time of my life — was when I was a child. A huge part of ‘Oh Snap’ was reconnecting with that.
“I was playing the keyboards and playing with all these different sounds I could find on my computer. I was listening to loops and I was dancing. It’s a very dance-centered album. When I was a little kid with my Casio keyboard, I would dance in my room. It was that kind of joyfulness.”
Born to a French mother and Haitian father, McLorin Salvant was raised in Miami among avid music-lovers. She started piano at age 5, joined a children’s choir at 8 and, as a teenager, took classical voice lessons.
Her mom listened to music from Paraguay, Cape Verde and France, as well as bluegrass and Aretha Franklin. Her father favored Haitian and Cuban bands. Her sister and friends liked a variety of styles.
“I’ve always had wide-ranging tastes in music,” McLorin Salvant said. “With my piano teachers, I had classical music on one end — and my French teacher used to play Bach during class — and everything else on the other. There wasn’t a hierarchy between any of these types of music. It was all day, all the time.”
‘Baroque my way’
McLorin Salvant has a bachelor’s degree in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble. She earned it while studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence.
When she last performed at SummerFest in 2022, she and Barnatan did an aria from Purcell’s 1689 opera, “Dido and Aeneas.” Baroque is one of several musical influences in “Ogresse,” a 90-minute theatrical opus that McLorin Salvant wrote in 2018.
The dark musical fairy tale premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Between international tour dates with her jazz band, she performed “Ogresse” at the Kennedy Center in 2022 and last May at Carnegie Hall.
Despite these occasional forays performing early music, McLorin Salvant has spent most of her career as a jazz singer.
“I wanted to be a baroque singer,” she said. “But then I was told: ‘You’re not going to be able to do both. You have to choose a genre. Things are going well with jazz, so forget about baroque singing.
“To realize that there’s another valid way of thinking is just so freeing. There are experts who sing baroque music the correct way. Thank God they exist; we need them. But, since they’re doing that job, I can do baroque my way.”
The title of Saturday’s concert is Book of Ayres, referring to ancient collections of baroque songs. It will include works by Purcell and John Dowland — who published the first book of such songs in 1597 — as well as early music from France.
At SummerFest, McLorin Salvant and her band will be performing Book of Ayres for only the third time. There will be overlaps among her jazz bandmates, including Sullivan Fortner, her longtime pianist.
“Sullivan’s an excellent pianist, keyboardist and organist,” McLorin Salvant said. “I put the harpsichord in front of him for the first time and he took to it pretty quickly.”
Appearing with Fortner and McLorin Salvant will be Emi Ferguson on flute, percussionist Keita Ogawa, Yasushi Nakamura on bass and violone, and Dušan Balarin on theorbo and lute. Nakamura and Ogawa have played in McLorin Salvant’s other bands.
“Some of us are babies at this,” the singer said. “Not Emi – she’s a genius. And Dušan is rooted firmly in the early-music world.
“We’re coming from these multi-faceted backgrounds. It’s really fun to tackle this with such a great group of people.”
SummerFest concerts continue through Aug. 23.
Cécile McLorin Salvant: Book of Ayres
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Baker-Baum Concert Hall, Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, 7600 Fay Ave., La Jolla.
Tickets: $75-$105
Phone: 858-459-3728
Online: theconrad.org