Burlington Discover Jazz Festival Headliner Cécile McLorin Salvant Transcends Musical Eras (2024)

Whenever a talented young musician appears on the scene, there are the usual hallmarks of rising up the ranks to stardom, from appearing on Spotify playlists to trending on social media to, hopefully, picking up accolades and awards. And when a newcomer is really good, the elder legends start weighing in.

In the case of New York City jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, it was Wynton Marsalis — the influential trumpeter and music director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center series — who, well, trumpeted her praises in a 2017 New Yorker article. "You get a singer like this once in a generation or two," Marsalis said.

Indeed, Salvant, 34, has taken the jazz world by storm since her 2010 debut LP, Cécile & the Jean-François Bonnel Paris Quintet. Six of her seven albums have been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, with WomanChild (2013), Dreams and Daggers (2017), and The Window (2018) taking home the prize.

The Miami-born singer is one of the headliners at this year's Burlington Discover Jazz Festival, opening the fest on Wednesday, June 5, with a performance on the Flynn Main Stage. She rang up Seven Days from her Brooklyn home to talk about the festival circuit, connecting to older audiences and how music threads through human history.

You cut your teeth as a performer at jazz festivals in little towns across Europe. Does it feel like a full-circle moment being a headliner and kicking off something like Burlington Discover Jazz Fest?

It feels really similar, actually. I love playing festivals; I'm honestly not sure what my career would look like without them. Over in England and France, there are so many traditional jazz festivals in little villages. And at a lot of these things, the median age is 80 years old. So when I was starting out, I was singing for audiences that were 60 years older than me.

Well, I'm not sure if you're aware, but Vermont is the third-oldest state in the U.S. these days, so you're likely to see some older listeners here, as well.

I didn't know that! Truly, it was kind of trippy playing for those audiences, but it was lovely, as well. To connect with people generations apart from me, many of whom have firsthand experience with the history of this music, I just find that really beautiful.

With this year's festival, there's been some debate about what is and what isn't jazz. As an artist whose jazz bona fides can't really be questioned, what do you make of that conversation?

Jazz is ever-evolving. It's like Pac-Man: It just eats everything and absorbs it; there's a voraciousness to the music itself. So the nature of jazz is change. If you listen to the earliest jazz recordings and the music that was made 40 years later, that change is much, much bigger than any change we've seen in the form in the last 40 years.

It's also historically attracted to other genres. What artists like myself are doing isn't anything special in that regard — we're just doing it with the flavors of today, but it's always been the norm in jazz. The cross-pollination between hip-hop and jazz has been happening since the 1970s. It's just part of the way art works in general, and I'll venture to even say it's human nature.

For the past three years, the Burlington jazz fest has featured Black musicians like Michael Mwenso, Lakecia Benjamin and now Adi Oasis as guest curators, all of whom made featuring Black voices one of their priorities in programming the event. In a state as statistically white as Vermont is, how important is it to prioritize representation on the bill of a festival like this?

Well, it's certainly important, and having a broader view is a great thing. But with that broad view must come quality. My fear is we say, "Oh, we're happy there's representation" but disregard the quality aspect. I feel it can sometimes be a discredit to the artist in those situations, because we're not viewing them as great artists first.

I still think that, ultimately, what's happening in the world today is that people are becoming much more visual and less auditory in their interactions with music. Music has become secondary to what a musician looks like or their branding. What I think should be celebrated is what the artist has to say and what the music sounds like.

Do you feel like that's the case with this year's jazz fest lineup?

Oh, certainly. But I do appreciate how difficult it can be to do that. Festivals in the U.S. have a tendency to hire and book the same acts — maybe it's a recency bias, I'm not sure. The financial situations of the fests are such that they have to program it to prioritize selling tickets. But if you can get away from that mindset and focus on putting together top-quality musicians with bold, new ideas, that's really the goal, I think.

So how do you get people to worry less about what the musician looks like and be more engaged with the actual music?

You just have to remind people what music really is for. It's an ancient way of communicating, a tried-and-true method of conveying messages, feelings, even passing down cultures and history. I think a lot about the fact that so many ancient poems were actually songs because humans singing them was the easiest way to remember them. Melody and memory! In my own experience, music unlocks so much in the mind. Maybe you hear a song you haven't listened to in years, but suddenly you're right back into a memory.

And that's the magic of it. It's activating and energizing, and it never stops evolving. How beautiful is that?

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.