Good Morning POU!
There is a lot of talent packed into 25 year old Cecile McLorin Salvant.
The French-American jazz vocalist was born August 28, 1989 in Miami, which for now is still her home base. Her father, a doctor, is Haitian; her mother, founder and president of a small bilingual French-English school in Miami, is mixed-race French-Guadeloupean. Their daughter grew up taking classical voice and piano lessons. After high school she moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study political science and law, and started classical voice classes there at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud. Then she visited a jazz class taught by the saxophonist and clarinetist Jean-François Bonnel.
“I asked her to sing me a song, and she sang ‘Misty,’ and I thought, ‘There she is!’ ” said Mr. Bonnel. He immediately put before her a list of the singers she should absorb before she went any further (Ms. Lincoln, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Babs Gonzales).
Oh, she’d heard a little jazz. She’d memorized Sarah Vaughan’s final record, “Brazilian Romance”; her mother played it around the house. But basically she was coming fresh to his canon. “I didn’t know any of it,” she remembered. “I didn’t like Billie Holiday. She freaked me out. She kind of depressed me.” (She had heard only the late, tragic Holiday.)
The first time Cecile sang with a band was just 2008. Two years later, she would wow the judges at the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition (Patti Austin, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kurt Elling, Al Jarreau and Dianne Reeves). She took home first place in the Jazz Vocals competition and has wowed audiences ever since.
If This Isn’t Love
I Didn’t Know What Time It Was
Poor Butterfly