Cécile McLorin Salvant could be described as Sarah Vaughan meets Edith Piaf. She came to us in Rotterdam for the first time in 2014, and has been a welcome guest at the festival ever since. This vocalist is Miami-born, but moved to Aix-en-Provence, France in 2007 to study law and classical singing. McLorin Salvant performs her own material as well as standards, in English and French. She won a Grammy twice for Best Vocal Jazz Album, in 2016 for One To Love and in 2018 for Dreams And Daggers. McLorin Salvant is inspired by jazz as well as medieval material and pop. On her penultimate album Ghost Song for example, she sang an incredible version of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. The title track of her latest album Mélusine, which is almost entirely in French, began with a memory of the music she had heard as a child at her dentist's office in Miami, which was Zouk.
