Jazz Break at Noon Archive - August 25-29, 2025

Archived Broadcast: August 25-29

Singing with the diction and lilt of a Broadway musical actress and the cultural consciousness of an anthropological documentarian, Cécile McLorin Salvant vocalizes narratives that she doesn’t merely sing about - she inhabits them. Obscure operas, forgotten fables, and seminal standards are her playground. Whether she is singing in English, Haitian Kreyòl, Occitan or her native French, Salvant’s performances blend history, theatre and social commentary in a big cauldron of artistic innovations.

She was born Cécile Sophie McLorin Salvant in Miami on August 28, 1989 to a French mother and a Haitian father. She took up classical piano at five, and joined a youth choir at eight, and as a teenager she started classical voice lessons. At 18 Salvant decided to move to France where she eventually earned a bachelor’s in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble while also studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence.

It was thanks to the well-timed encouragement of her mother and the unrelenting behest of a music teacher in France, that Salvant became a jazz singer at all - and a highly decorated one at that.

Salvant won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz competition for vocalists in 2010 and received three consecutive Grammys for best jazz vocal album, and nominations for two more albums. In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. In 2023 Angela Davis wrote: “She is, without a doubt, her generation’s most accomplished jazz vocalist.” Cécile McLorin Salvant has released seven albums as a leader and is featured on a number of significant recordings.

This week on the Jazz Break at Noon Bria Woods curated a listening experience that follows the chronology of Salvant’s discography. You can playback each show to hear music from some of her top inspirations and snippets of a recorded conversation with KRTU before her San Antonio performance in April of this year.

Listen to each weekday's full broadcast playback below!

Monday

The Origin of Cécile McLorin Salvant

Tuesday

“I only sing for those I love.”

Wednesday

Cécile and friends

Thursday

In conversation with Cécile McLorin Salvant

Friday

Oh Snap!