Cécile McLorin Salvant, is a composer, singer, and visual artist.The late Jessye Norman described Salvant as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings”.
Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, baroque and folkloric music. Salvant is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists,and humor.
Salvant won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010. She has received three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for “The Window”, “Dreams and Daggers”, and “For One To Love”, and was nominated for the award in 2014 for her album “Woman Child”.
In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released 2x Grammy Nominated “Ghost Song” in 2022, and in 2023 the highly anticipated, 2x Grammy Nominated follow up - “Mélusine”, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl.
On September 19, 2025, Nonesuch released “Oh Snap” - an album comprised of twelve very personal songs composed and produced by Salvant. The album features longtime collaborators Sullivan Fortner, Yasushi Nakamura, and Kyle Poole, as well as cameos from singers June McDoom and Kate Davis.
Salvant wrote these short, intimate songs as part of a creative quest: To place spontaneity and joy at the center of her writing process. She originally recorded them alone, at home, never intending for them to be released, using digital tools and effects that she had never played with before, like GarageBand, Logic, AutoTune, Midi plugins, drum loops, vocal effects, reverb, and filters. The songs reflect Salvant’s wide-ranging musical influences fromher 1990s childhood in Miami—from boy bands to grunge to classical to folk—and include party tracks with beats, samba grooves, and quiet folk songs.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida, of a French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at 5, sang in a children’s choir at 8, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager.
Salvant received 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, France.
Salvant’s latest work, Ogresse, is a musical fable in the form of a cantata that blends genres (folk, baroque, jazz, country). Salvant wrote the story, lyrics, and music. It is arranged by Darcy James Argue for a thirteen-piece orchestra of multi-instrumentalists. Ogresse, both a biomythography and an homage to the Erzulie (as painted by Gerard Fortune) and Sara Baartman, explores fetishism, hunger, diaspora, cycles of appropriation, lies, othering, and ecology. It is in development to become an animated feature-length film, which Salvant will direct.
Salvant makes large-scale textile drawings. Her visual art can now be found at Picture Room in Brooklyn, NY.
For more than a decade, Sullivan Fortner has been stretching deep-rooted talents as a pianist, composer, bandleader and uncompromising individualist. The GRAMMY Award-winning artist and recipient of the 2026 Larry J. Bell Jazz Artist Award has garnered international praise as a leader and a fierce collaborator. He earned the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance on Samara Joy’s “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me” and the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album alongside Cécile McLorin Salvant for her acclaimed album The Window, on which he serves as both key player and producer. Fortner also has earned GRAMMY nods for his 2023 release Solo Game and his provocative arrangement of “Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying” from Salvant’s 2022 release Ghost Song.
In addition to his celebrated releases as a co-leader and collaborator, as a solo leader he has issued Aria (2015); Moments Preserved (2018); Solo Game (2024), which earned 4-star reviews in DownBeat and France’s Telerama Magazine; and Southern Nights (2025) which landed Fortner on the February cover of DownBeat. “[Sullivan] is one of the best pianists in the world today and he has all ofthe musical attributes I love: creativity, technique always in the service of expression, joy and humor, fearlessness and pianistic mastery,” says mentor and album producer, GRAMMY-nominated artist Fred Hersch.
Winner of the 2024 DownBeat Critics Poll for Rising Star Jazz Group: Sullivan Fortner Trio, the prolific artist soon earned the Western Jazz Presenters grant, empowering him to lead his trio — which features Tyrone Allen and Kayvon Gordon — on a coastal tour of the U.S. through Albuquerque, New Mexico, Portland, Oregon and Oakland and Monterey, California. Over the past decade, he has enjoyed creative associations with such diverse voices as Wynton Marsalis, Paul Simon, Diane Reeves, Etienne Charles and John Scofield; his frequent and longtime collaborators have included Ambrose Akinmusire, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Stefon Harris, Kassa Overall, Tivon Pennicott, Peter Bernstein, Nicholas Payton, Billy Hart, Gary Bartz, Chief Adjuah, Fred Hersch and the late Roy Hargrove. Recent collaborations include GRAMMY-nominated releases Dear Love (EmpressLegacy) and Generations from leaders Jazzmeia Horn and The Baylor Project, respectively.
Playing solo or leading an orchestra, Fortner engages harmony and rhythmic ideas through curiosity and clarity. Within phrases, he finds universes, and listeners often hear how he’s moved by each note he explores. Coming up in New Orleans, Fortner began playing piano at age 7, following a storied lineage of improvisers, masters of time and every iteration of the blues. He earned his Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory and Master of Music in Jazz Performance from Manhattan School of Music (MSM). A champion of mentorship, Fortner has offered masterclasses at MSM, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), Purdue University, Lafayette Summer Music Workshop, Belmont University and Oberlin Conservatory where he held a faculty position. In spring 2023, he again returned to his undergraduate alma mater as visiting professor of jazz piano.
A highly-sought improviser, Fortner has performed across the country and throughout the world at such cultural institutions as Snug Harbor, New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Lorraine’s and The Jazz Playhouse in New Orleans, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, Jazz Standard and Smalls Jazz Club in New York City. He’s appeared at celebrated festivals, including Newport, Monterey, Discover, Tri-C and Gillmore Keyboard, among others. In 2019, Fortner brought his band to the historic Village Vanguard for a week-long engagement he would reprise in 2020 as avirtual performance during lockdown. His notable studio contributions include work on Etienne Charles’s Kaiso (Culture Shock, 2011), Donald Harrison’s Quantum Leap (FOMP, 2010), and Theo Croker’s The Fundamentals (Left Sided Music, 2007).
Pulling distinct elements from different eras, Fortner’s artistry preserves the tradition and evolves the sound. He seeks connections among different musical styles that are at once deeply soulful and wildly inventive. Both his works and his insights have been featured in culture drivers from The New York Times to The Root. Further accolades include the 2015 Cole Porter Fellowship awarded by the American Pianists Association, Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship, the 2016 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and, in 2020, the prestigious Shifting Foundation Grant for artistic career development.
