‘I love being surprised by music,’ Cécile McLorin Salvant declares. At 33, the Miami-born artist is widely recognised as the most accomplished jazz vocalist of her generation, yet for all her mastery of tradition, she refuses to be bound by expectations. Although she has an immaculate way with the American Songbook, she’s also turned her hand to soul, blues and gospel. Her current album Mélusine draws on Salvant’s Haitian and French heritage while highly acclaimed 2022 collection Ghost Song features interpretations of tracks by Kate Bush and Sting alongside English folk tune ‘The Unquiet Grave’. 

‘Most of the songs, if not all, had a moment when I was listening to them that surprised me, that made me perk up and go, “what’s that? What’s going on here”?’ she relates. ‘And so something like “Wuthering Heights” . . . the first time I heard it, I think I was 16. And I was shocked; I was like, “what the hell is this?” It was so much sensory overload. And then 15 years later, I decided to record it.’

This element of surprise extends to Salvant’s own compositions and concepts. At the Edinburgh International Festival, she presents two shows: a concert featuring her regular band and the UK premiere of Ogresse, a dramatic song cycle telling the story of a lovesick, ravenous monster. Inspired by Haitian vodou and the true story of Sarah Baartman (a South African woman exhibited as a so-called freak-show attraction in 19th-century France), this dark fairytale explores themes of racism, sexism and colonialism. 

‘I always wanted to write a longer narrative story, something that I could tell over the course of a show. I had always been interested in monsters and female monsters. And, of course, I’m interested in the idea of hunger and the different ways in which that manifests itself: perception and fatphobia. As time went by, I thought Ogresse needs to be its own story. And so the story unfolded pretty quickly.’ 

After six months of writing, Salvant handed the songs over to Darcy James Argue who arranged them for a 13-piece ensemble that includes leading avant-garde musicians such as trumpeter Kirk Knuffke and guitarist/banjoist Brandon Seabrook, who will be joining her in Edinburgh. Salvant is currently working with Belgian director Lia Bertels on an animated version of Ogresse, but while the show features projections and lighting, the staging is ‘straightforward’, with the focus on Salvant. ‘It’s such a dense story, you have to stay with me, otherwise you can get lost. The projections have to be simple enough that you don’t get distracted and lose part of the story. It’s musically dense. There are so many instruments, different voices, and we’re not really helping you by splitting the characters. So I think we have to have something that’s dramatic, but also rather simple.’

While Ogresse is tightly organised, with only so much room for improvisation, Salvant promises to follow it with a ‘crazy and spontaneous’ concert featuring close collaborators such as pianist Sullivan Fortner. In her shows, Salvant draws freely from her seven albums to date, although there is likely to be a fair representation of the French and Haitian creole songs from Mélusine.

‘I never thought that I would sing in French anywhere other than France, but it seems as though people like it,’ she shares. ‘This woman came to see me after a show and she was like, “I only know you from this one French song that you did. I don’t speak French, but I love it”.’

Echoing the mytho-poetic aspects of Ogresse, Mélusine fuses the European folk tale of a woman whose lower body takes on the form of a snake with the story of Damballa and Ayida-Weddo from Haitian vodou (Salvant created a series of storybook drawings as a visual accompaniment to the record). 

She sees this as an organic reflection of her heritage. ‘I was born with these things brought together automatically, just from having parents from different countries; my mom being French and my dad being Haitian.’ By singing in different languages and referencing diverse traditions, Salvant is a translator of culture, forming the ‘familiar and the strange’ into a singular vision. 

Cécile McLorin Salvant: Ogresse, Festival Theatre, 5 August, 8pm; Cécile McLorin Salvant In Concert, Usher Hall, 7 August, 7.30pm.