CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT & SULLIVAN FORTNER

This summer, the exceptional artist will make her ZigZag debut in an intimate duo setting with her congenial partner Sullivan Fortner, who last caused a storm of enthusiasm in our club in April.

Make sure you get your tickets in advance for this one-off special concert.

Cécile McLorin Salvant is an American jazz singer and composer.

She is one of the most important and influential voices of her generation and has an impressive stylistic range, a charismatic presence and is able to give meaning to every note and every sound like no other, not least thanks to her breathtakingly versatile voice, which she has mastered to perfection.

Salvant was born in Miami to a Haitian father and a French mother. She began playing the piano at the age of 5, started singing in a choir and received classical vocal training. Her interest in jazz was awakened during her teenage years and she soon combined her influences, as she says herself, into a mixture of "jazz and blues, with elements of folk and musical".

In 2010, she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, the most prestigious jazz competition in the world. From then on, her steep rise to the top of the jazz world began; she has been wowing critics and audiences alike for years now.

She has worked with some of the most important artists in the jazz world, including Wynton Marsalis, who said of her: "You get a singer like this once in a generation!"

Her albums For One to Love, Dreams and Daggers and the duo album The Window, a collaboration with Sullivan Fortner, all won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Salvant speaks and sings fluently in French and English and combines her vocal influences from jazz, classical music and musicals with literary themes, most recently on her album Mélusine, released in 2023.

Sullivan Fortner is without doubt one of the most creative and enterprising pianists of his generation. His virtuoso pianistic skills are never an end in themselves; his seemingly never-ending wealth of ideas impresses critics and audiences alike. Over the past ten years, Fortner has developed his deep-rooted talents as a pianist, composer, bandleader and uncompromising individualist.

The Grammy Award-winning artist from New Orleans has released several critically acclaimed albums as a solo artist alongside his work with McLorin Salvant, and he is only at the beginning of his career.

New York-based Fortner has been recognized in several categories of the DownBeat Critics Poll, winning first place in the Rising Star Piano and Rising Star Jazz Artist categories. In addition to collaborating with artists as diverse as Wynton Marsalis, Paul Simon, Diane Reeves and John Scofield, Fortner has also worked frequently and extensively with Ambrose Akinmusire, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Peter Bernstein, Nicholas Payton, Billy Hart, Gary Bartz, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Fred Hersch and the late Roy Hargrove. By bringing together different elements from different eras, Fortner preserves tradition and evolves the sound.

He seeks connections between different musical styles that are at once deeply soulful and wildly inventive. Both his works and his insights have been featured in culturally significant publications from The New York Times to The Root.

His awards include the 2015 Cole Porter Fellowship from the American Pianists Association, the Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship, the 2016 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, and the prestigious 2020 Shifting Foundation Grant for the development of his artistic career.