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Cecile McLorin Salvant, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner, is a singer and composer bringing historical perspective, a renewed sense of drama, and an enlightened musical understanding to both jazz standards and her own original compositions. Classically trained, steeped in jazz, blues and folk, and drawing from musical theater and vaudeville, Ms. Salvant embraces a wide-ranging repertoire that broadens the possibilities for live performance. Her new album, “Ghost Song,” features a diverse mix of seven originals and five interpretations on the themes of ghosts, nostalgia, and yearning. “It’s unlike anything I’ve done before,” she says. “I’m embracing my weirdness!”
“Rhythm in Contrast” announces Charles Goold’s arrival as a composer to follow in jazz. Track after track, the drummer calls on the most important people and causes in his life and he writes about them. He started sitting in at New York clubs at the age of 13, has toured with Wynton Marsalis through Jazz at Lincoln Center, and has played with several hip hop luminaries. It was not until Goold began studying at the Julliard School that he turned his mind to writing. The new disc reflects all of this journey.
Also this week, the Hungarian-born saxophonist Gabor Bolla features his own compositions as well as jazz standards by Monk, Strayhorn, Ellis Marsalis and J.J. Johnson on “On the Move”;
Woodwind player and arranger Scott Silbert, who was the chief arranger for the United States Navy Band for fifteen years and who now plays lead tenor and arranges for the prestigious Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, unveils his first album as a leader, “Introducing the Scott Silbert Big Band: Jump Children,” featuring Scott’s transcriptions and arrangements of some of the lesser-performed big band works of the 1930s and ‘40s;
and British-born saxophonist Benn Clatworthy offers up the newest release from his Southern California-based band System 6, “Indispensable.”