Cécile McLorin Salvant – Show Programme, Auckland Arts Festival 2018

15 March Great Hall Auckland Town Hall

CÉCILE McLORIN SALVANT & THE AARON DIEHL TRIO

PERFORMERS Vocals Cécile McLorin Salvant

1hr 30mins no interval photography: mark fitton The Aaron Diehl Trio Aaron Diehl (Piano) Paul Sikivie (Bass) Kyle Poole (Drums)

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CÉCILE McLORIN SALVANT Cécile McLorin Salvant was born and raised in Miami, Florida, of a French mother and a Haitian father. She started classical piano studies at five, and began singing in the Miami Choral Society at eight. Early on, she developed an interest in classical voice, began studying with private instructors, and later with Edward Walker, vocal teacher at the University of Miami.

In 2007, Cécile moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study law as well as classical and baroque voice at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory. It was in Aix-en-Provence, with reedist and teacher Jean-François Bonnel, that she started learning about jazz, and sang with her first band. In 2009, after a series of concerts in Paris, she recorded her first album Cécile, with Jean-François Bonnel’s Paris Quintet.

A year later, she won the Thelonious Monk competition in Washington D.C. Over the years, she has developed a curiosity for the history of American music, and the connections between jazz, vaudeville, blues and folk music.

Cécile carefully chooses her repertoire, oftentimes unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs, with strong stories.

She enjoys popularity in Europe and in the United States, performing in clubs, concert halls and festivals. In 2014, her second album, WomanChild (Mack Avenue Records), was nominated for a Grammy.

Her third album, For One To Love (for Mack Avenue Records), was recorded in

2015 with Aaron Diehl (piano), Paul Sikivie (bass) and Lawrence Leathers (drums).

In 2016, For One To Love won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album.

Her fourth album, Dreams and Daggers, (for Mack Avenue Records), was recorded in part live at the Village Vanguard in 2016 with Aaron Diehl (piano), Paul Sikivie (bass) and Lawrence Leathers (drums), The Catalyst Quartet and Sullivan Fortner.

In 2018, she became a double Grammy Award winner with Dreams and Daggers also winning Best Jazz Vocal Album.

Ben Ratliff writes in The New York Times, “she sings clearly, with her full pitch range, from a pronounced low end to full and distinct high notes, used sparingly [...] Her voice clamps into each song, performing careful variations on pitch, stretching words but generally not scatting; her face conveys meaning, representing sorrow or serenity like a silent-movie actor.”

Jazz journalist Fred Kaplan, who profiled Salvant in The New Yorker, believes that she has a masterly grasp on exhibiting a wide emotional range in her music. “Her blues are blue. Her swings swing,” Kaplan says. “She has vast, almost operatic range.” He also says that Salvant digs into a lyric like an actress. “She finds things in a lyric that other jazz singers kind of glide by,” he says. “’Mad About the Boy’ – if you just looked at the lyrics, you’d think this is really a song written by a crazy person. Or a song narrated by a crazy person. And she gets into that. It is a mad song.”

THE AARON DIEHL TRIO PAUL SIKIVIE (bass) moved to New York City in 2007 from Florida, seeking training from the masters of America’s musical art, jazz. His search took him through the classroom and onto stages across the city and world.

AARON DIEHL (piano) is the 2011 Cole Porter Fellow in Jazz of the American Pianists Association. His distinctive interpretations of the music of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, and other masters pays homage to the tradition while establishing his own original voice. Diehl has performed with the Wynton Marsalis Septet, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Benny Golson, Hank Jones, Wycliffe Gordon, Victor Goines, Wessell Anderson and Loren Schoenberg, and has been featured on Marian McPartland’s NPR radio show Piano Jazz. His international touring has included major European jazz festivals as well as performances in South America and Asia. In addition to the Mozart Jazz trio album, he has recently released Live at Caramoor, from his solo performance at the prestigious festival in the summer of 2008.

His latest trio CD is entitled Live at the Players.

A native of Columbus, OH, Diehl is a graduate of The Juilliard School where his teachers included Kenny Barron, Eric Reed and Oxana Yablonskaya. His honours include Lincoln Center’s prestigious Martin E. Segal award in 2004, winner of the 2003 Jazz Arts Group Hank Marr Jazz Competition, and Outstanding Soloist at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2002 Essentially Ellington Competition. Immediately following graduation from high school he toured with the Wynton Marsalis Septet. Diehl currently resides in Manhattan where he serves as pianist for St. Joseph of the Holy Family Church in Harlem.

Paul has enjoyed and benefitted from playing with some great musicians: Matt Wilson, Ted Nash, Johnny O’Neal, Frank Kimbrough, Benny Green, Wycliffe Gordon, Chico Hamilton, Wes Anderson, Aaron Diehl, Marc Devine and a host of others. He received a M.M. from Juilliard in 2009, having completed his B.M at the University of North Florida in 2006.

KYLE POOLE (drums) hailed by Jazz Speaks as a “young prodigious drummer,” Los Angeles native Kyle Poole has been residing in New York City since 2011 and continues to impress wherever his drums take him next. Along with his band of fellow New York jazz upstarts aptly titled Poole & the Gang, Kyle has performed in New York’s most esteemed jazz clubs, notably Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola & SMOKE Jazz, culminating in a weekly residency at Small’s Jazz Club lasting nearly three years. One of Poole’s chief missions, is to expand jazz’s audience by incorporating all dance styles of music, reaching back to ragtime and bebop, while forging ahead all the way to funk, hiphop and beyond. With the constant fluctuation of genre, rhythm and harmony, Poole & the Gang connects these musical dots in a uniquely improvised fashion, while audiences worldwide are delighted to simply, “go with the flow.”

photography: john abbott (aaron diehl)

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