Edinburgh International Festival preview: Cécile McLorin Salvant on her 'sort of murder ballad' Ogresse

Triple Grammy winner Cécile McLorin Savant tells Fiona Shepherd about the wildly cosmopolitan roots of her music and how childhood stories and racist history fuse together in her new song cycle, Ogresse

US jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant is alive to influences and the “sticky” way that art informs art – by which she means works and stories that burrow into her being and then find their way out through her eclectic music which, at any given moment, can reflect her love of classic jazz, Caribbean folklore, hip-hop and R&B, medieval legends, French chanson, Celtic storytelling and Kate Bush.

She puts this down to her upbringing in a Miami home filled – all day, every day – with the music beloved of her Haitian father and French mother. “My mom just recently found these home videos of me and my sister as little kids,” says Salvant, “and I was shocked to see that literally every video has some kind of crazy music in the background from all over the world – Brazilian, Senegalese, everything. I was stunned and thought ‘I should have the same amount of music in my house now as I did before’. I think everyone should.”​

But why stop at music? A painting of the vodou spirit Erzulie by Haitian artist Gerard Fortune hangs over the piano where Salvant composes – how could it not influence her latest piece, “a sort of murder ballad” called Ogresse, which receives its UK premiere at the Festival? Salvant sings as the narrator but also inhabits the other characters in the fabulist song cycle, accompanied by a 13-piece orchestra.​

Cécile McLorin Salvant PIC: Courtesy of the artist

“The narrator sings on this drone with a banjo and that’s our anchor point,” she says. “Depending on the scene, we go into different moods and sonic spaces and the characters each have little leitmotif melodies. If you had to pin down a genre, there’s folk, bluegrass, jazz, blues, baroque music, showtunes and Broadway and musical theatre. There’s even the influence of R&B ballads in there….” Is that all?​

“But I really went with my instinct,” she continues. “Any inspiration for Ogresse was by osmosis. There wasn’t any research or clear inspiration other than all the stories I was told and the movies I watched as a kid – stories I learned about from Disney, like Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid. I didn’t realise when I was writing this that so many of these stories that were so important to me as a child did show up.”​

However, another all-too-real-life story also haunts Ogresse – that of Sarah Baartman, a young Khoikhoi woman from South Africa’s Eastern Cape, who was exhibited in European freakshows of the early 19th century as the “Hottentot Venus”, treated as a scientific curiosity in her lifetime and then displayed again post-mortem as a museum attraction.​

“That story shook me to my core,” says Salvant. “It felt very universal, very real, this woman who gets shown as an object of both desire and ridicule for money and how that leads to issues of gender, sexuality, race but also issues of human identity that go beyond those boundaries – that thing of ‘please don’t look at me, I want to be invisible’ and also ‘please look at me – do you think I’m worthwhile?’”​

Although Salvant is at pains to say that Ogresse is not Baartman’s story, “she is a part of these stories that have shaken me, moved me and changed me, that resonated so much with me when I first encountered them.”​

If anyone can embody one of this year’s Festival themes, “a perspective that’s not one’s own”, it is Salvant, an erudite storyteller and interpreter in her own right who doesn’t just excel in music but is also a visual artist – plans to turn Ogresse into an animated feature are under way, using Salvant’s illustrations as the basis for the animation.​

Salvant has been immersed in the arts from an early age, studying classical piano by the time she was five, singing in the Miami Children’s Chorus from the age of eight and taking private classical voice lessons as a teenager before pivoting to jazz while she was studying in France in the late Noughties. “It was a lot more fun than the classical singing because I got to sing with bands,” she says.​

Salvant is now a triple Grammy winner, acing the Best Jazz Vocal Album category in 2016, 2018 and 2019, also winning the Thelonious Monk competition in 2019 and the Glen Gould Protégé Prize in 2019. Her latest album, Mélusine, uses an intoxicating cocktail of songs in French, English, Haitian Creole and Occitan and a couple of originals to retell the medieval fable of the eponymous half-woman, half-snake. A number of these songs will likely make their way into her second Festival appearance, a free-flowing Usher Hall concert with her band during which she can showcase her cross-genre, multi-lingual skills.​

“It was time for me to do something in my maternal language,” she says of Mélusine. French is still the language of home, her mother’s family speak Occitan and her paternal grandmother would only speak Creole, “so it’s in my ear even if I don’t necessarily speak it or understand everything. I’ve never fully gone towards a language that I didn’t have a close connection to.”​

While her family have shaped her musical tastes and linguistic interests, she is quite happy to go down the digital rabbit hole of Wikipedia and streaming sites to unearth material she can interpret in her clear, natural tones. She advocates “listening in this archaeological dig way and listening wide and big” and relishes the opportunity to share the unexpected – truly a perspective that’s not one’s own.​

“I think a lot of DJs and rappers would do that in the Eighties and Nineties,” she says. “It was valued to find sounds that were rare or strange or deep cuts. I think I would love to pick music for films – that’s my nerdy mixtape side. I get a lot of joy out of introducing a new song to people, rather than rehashing something that’s already been done.”

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Ogresse, Festival Theatre, 5 August; Cécile McLorin Salvant In Concert, Usher Hall, 7 August