Cécile McLorin Salvant at Virginia Tech

MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner, singer, and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant brings historical perspective, a renewed sense of drama, and a clear-eyed take on jazz standards and her own original compositions. Classically trained; steeped in jazz, blues, and folk; and drawing from musical theatre and vaudeville, Salvant embraces a wide-ranging repertoire with her rich, powerful voice, broadening the possibilities for live performance.

Salvant’s latest release, Ghost Song, explores the (many) ways people can be haunted — by lingering memories, roads not taken, ghosts real and imagined. Its intense, disquietingly evocative songs follow living souls as they confront torments of absence. Some characters lament loved ones gone too soon, others are troubled by the remnants of vanished romance, still others are paralyzed by the sense of time galloping past.