Cécile McLorin Salvant, better known as Cécile, was back in Portland Feb. 10, this time at the fairly intimate (300-400 seats, depending on the concert configuration) Alberta Rose Theatre. PDX Jazz brought in the MacArthur Fellow, Grammy Award winner and utterly original jazz vocalist as an appetizer to the Biamp Portland Jazz Festival, which runs March 5-14, a change of month from previous years in an effort to avoid lousy February weather. Cécile was sold out, and judging by the audience’s response to the 90-minute no-intermission show, concert-goers appeared awestruck and stood and clapped until she came up with an encore.

Cécile has a powerhouse voice. She has perfect pitch, a range from tenor that dips occasionally into baritone to high soprano, and precise and expressive articulation. She tells a song’s story with full-on emotion or playfulness, sometimes with eye-popping humor and surprise, and she does engage the audience occasionally by popping out her eyes from behind her granny glasses. She writes and arranges many of her tunes, and isn’t afraid to take on those by one of her idols like Sarah Vaughan, whom she listened to tirelessly as a kid, or by Sting, as she did in this concert. Scatting is the only vocal acrobatics she doesn’t do much of – not a requirement for jazz singers, but often a bonus – not that she needs one.

“It’s hard to think of a contemporary jazz vocalist with as much control over her instrument as Cécile,” Kerry Politzer, a Portland jazz pianist and educator, said. “Not only is Cécile an amazing technician, but she’s a spellbinding performer.”

Just look at what she wears – quirky shapes of vintage and/or arty outfits in a crayon-box of colors – nothing you’ve seen much before on the jazz stage (maybe Broadway or opera), just as her clear, exacting singing voice that surpasses most of today’s jazz vocalists’ voices is not something you hear every day.

No doubt artists, even the most original and distinctive ones, stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. “I hear a lineage of jazz singers in her voice,” Sherry Alves, a Portland State University vocal jazz professor and jazz singer, wrote in an email. “Obviously there’s Sarah Vaughan, but so many more people depending on the song or the moment. I hesitate to credit other vocalists for her sound. We have a tendency, and perhaps need, to categorize and compare a newer great artist with greats of the past. I don’t think that’s necessary with Cécile. She’s an incredible jazz musician, and her knowledge of the music and its history certainly comes through in her sound. But if you hear Ella or Sarah or Nancy (Wilson), it might only be for a split second! Her sound is so dynamic in timbre and color and inflection.”

Cécile was quick to show respect to her trio for her sound, and in typical jazz fashion, she gave each of her bandmates space to solo: Sullivan Fortner on keys, Yasushi Nakamura on bass, and Kyle Poole on drums, all first-call musicians who never overwhelmed or upstaged her – well, pianist Fortner is an extroverted playful guy and he can take over if he wants to. He walked offstage during her vivid “John Henry” song and ambled back with a giant cup of coffee while she was still singing. The semi-audiacious move drew some audience laughter. He and Cécile have played together for years, and he was definitely on his game for this show.

The trio helped her to sound terrific, but without the group she would have been almost as good. “She has obvious command of her instrument (people like to credit her classical studies like it’s the golden ticket to great singing, but I’d rather credit the person and not one methodology),” Alves wrote. “She uses her voice to express stories in a way that is incredibly unique. While you can certainly hear the past in her voice, absolutely no one – past or present – sounds like her. She uses her instrument to express far past the often traditional ‘pretty’ female vocal sound, finding grit, soul, bright and dark, heavy and light, aggressive and gentle, funny and serious.”

Shapeshifting

Cécile was “discovered” in 2010 as a teenager when she won the Thelonious Monk Competition judged by vocal jazz royalty Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dianne Reeves, Kurt Elling, Patti Austin and Al Jarreau. They noted “her remarkable voice and striking ability to inhabit the emotional space of every song and turn it into a compelling statement.” Since 2010 she has released eight solo albums, her last, Oh Snap, which she made mostly at home in 2025 with her computer. Her trio and composer/singer Kate Davis, who wrote the concert’s encore, turn up on a few tracks. Six of the eight albums have been nominated for Grammy Awards, and three won Best Jazz Vocal Album: For One to Love (2015), Dreams and Daggers (2017) and the 2018 album, The Window.

Her original language is French (her mother is French; her dad, Haitian; she studied for a while in Aix-on-Provence; and her family spoke French at home when she was growing up), so she sings in French as well as in English. She moved quietly through a lengthy 17th-century chantlike piece in French. She’s relentlessly versatile and refuses to get stuck in one genre or style of jazz. Her song selection is unique, Alves mentioned. “She finds rare gems and repurposes them brilliantly.”

And there’s more to be astonished by, said jazz musician and University of Oregon Jazz Studies and Popular Music professor Sean Petersen, who attended the concert. “The most striking aspect of her performance was the boldness with which she juxtaposes contrasting repertoire and vocal qualities. One moment she sounds like a timid girl, squeaking out a lyric, and the next she is roaring down to a baritone range with authority and weight.”

To illustrate, her voice shapeshifted from a growling folk tune, “John Henry,” which she sang a cappella into a sweet poetic ballad-like piece, “What Does Blue Mean to You?,” a tune about colors, metaphorically of course, inspired by Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Later she sang a witty “Anything but Now” that mocks one’s inability to be in the moment, which had the audience nodding along. She covered the Sting song “Until” and a standard that she made her own titled “Can’t You See How Happy We Could Be?” It laments her discontentment with a somewhat shabby home, but she sings it ironically and with a splash of dry wit. Throughout her shows and her songs, she pokes fun at convention. She is her own person, and chuckles in her often sung “Barbara Song” from Weill and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera about defying bourgeois expectations.

For me, the best moment was Cécile’s encore with Kate Davis, a composer, singer and bass player who has left the New York jazz and indie-rock scene and moved back to Portland, her hometown, to be a music therapist. “I saw a sparrow take this stone and pass it on, it will not erode,” the lyrics go in “Take This Stone,” which questions identity, expectations and roles. It’s tender, tough, quiet and not a stretch at all that Davis and Cécile have connected their poetic and musical worlds. Cécile called up Davis, who was in the audience, to the stage and the two sang Davis’s tune in a beautifully understated harmonized duet. That was after Fortner and Davis embraced on stage; the two went to Manhattan School of Music together 15 years ago, so that was a nice reunion, too. What a night. What a small world.