via Paste Magazine
The best singers can fashion a different voice for each song—adjusting attack, attitude and texture to inhabit a tune from start to finish. Cécile McLorin Salvant goes beyond that; she often creates a different voice for each section of a song. It’s a radical approach that makes her the most interesting singer around today—no matter what the genre, no matter what the language.
Earlier this month at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Salvant demonstrated this methodology on “Ghost Song,” the title track from last year’s album. She sang the opening verses a cappella, belting out her complaint that her lover has left her as if the song were a field holler, a protest against an unfair life in the cotton fields.
When her terrific quartet joined her for the chorus, however, she shifted gears to sing, “I’ll dance with the ghost of our love,” in a dreamy croon, as if this were a French cabaret number, and she was luxuriating in fond memories of an affair. When she repeated that same line again and again on the coda, however, her voice shifted again, becoming the crazed, edgy voice of a woman haunted by the song’s ghosts.