Dreams And Daggers is the fourth album by Cecile McLorin Salvant, and her most ambitious to date. First, and to state the obvious, it is a double CD, or for vinyl lovers, a triple album. But unlike many of the triple albums released in years gone by, you don’t wish they’d made this one a double!
Second, she has made her name as a singer not only because of her magnificent voice, but also by focusing on less obvious song choices. Rather than rehash the Great American Songbook, she has looked for lesser-known tunes by some of the great songwriters, interspersed with what she describes as ‘difficult’ songs, often about racial issues, which are sadly still relevant today. Dreams And Daggers features more standards than her previous albums, but never feels like a sell out; in part because she inhabits these songs, and makes them her own, but also because it feels like a more balanced portrait of what makes her so special.
The majority of the new album was recorded live a year ago at New York’s Village Vanguard. It’s a stunning recording, which captures every nuance of her phrasing, but also reveals the important contributions of her long-standing band – the magnificent Aaron Diehl on piano, Paul Sikivie on bass and Lawrence Leathers on drums. The live recording also captures the spirit of singing in a way in which the studio albums struggle to replicate, whether it is the unexpected shout of ‘Mad!’ in Mad About The Boy, the dramatic intensity she brings to Gershwin’s My Man’s Gone Now, or the humour in Bessie Smith’s Sam Jones’ Blues.
The album also includes some studio cuts recorded with a string quartet, which showcase some of her own writing skills, but also the delicate arrangements of Paul Sikivie.
With a generous twenty-three songs to choose from, highlights are too many to mention. Noel Coward’s Mad About The Boy is given a slow, dark reading, with Salvant lingering over the ambiguous lyrics, before Diehl delivers a fine solo, well-supported by Sikivie.
She brings her full range to Frank Loesser’s Never Will I Marry, which stretches from a whisper, to strong and strident.
Somehow I Never Could Believe is taken from Street Scene, the jazz opera by Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes. It’s a difficult song to sing, and requires an element of theatricality, but Salvant is up to the task, and delivers a quite magnificent performance.
Bessie Smith’s ribald You’ve Got To Give Me Some lightens the tone, particularly when it is revealed that the singer’s mother is in the audience, and receives an apology from her daughter! Likewise If A Girl Isn’t Pretty, from Funny Girl, which seems even more relevant now, in this age of reality TV ‘stars’.
My Man’s Gone Now is quite stunning, the dramatic ending met with silence from the crowd, before they erupt into applause.
Salvant’s last album, For One To Love (2015) earned her a Grammy award, and deservedly so. But Dreams And Daggers is a bolder, more daring album, and will be on my list of the best albums of 2017.
