Grammy-winning singer double-dips in two Tucson festivals

Three-time Grammy-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant straddles the jazz and classical worlds, which makes sense why her concert on Friday, Jan. 19, is simultaneously part of the HSL Properties Tucson Jazz Festival and the Tucson Desert Song Festival.

University of Arizona’s Arizona Arts Live is presenting Salvant’s concert at Centennial Hall — 1020 E. University Blvd., on the UA campus — as part of both festivals.

Salvant is one of those artists who is impossible to box in. She earned a bachelor’s degree in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble at the same time she was studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, France.

But she’s equally comfortable connecting the dots between vaudeville, blues, folkloric and theater.

Did we forget to mention she’s also a visual artist?

Animation drawings by the 2010 Thelonious Monk competition winner who also landed a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (aka “Genius Grant”) in 2020 are available through the Picture Room in Brooklyn.

We caught up with Salvant via email to find out what to expect from her concert on Friday.

As for repertoire, she says it will be a mixed bag.

“Jazz, some baroque, some originals, maybe a song by Sting, some songs from musicals and operas,” she said. “To me they’re all just songs! I don’t really think about genre when I create a set list.”

Salvant has a reputation for being able to transform “well-worn lyrics” from songs that often fade from the collective conscious and make them her own.

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“I try to stick to the lyric, try to really understand it, and feel it, and translate that to the audience,” she explained of her approach. “So the goal is not to even sing it well, but to tell the story clearly. Sometimes we’ve heard a song a million times and still don’t really understand what it’s about.”

Some of the music she unearths comes from “daily listening of a wide range of music from all over the world and from many different time periods, from the first ever written music, folk songs that have no real birthdate to whatever is coming out now,” she said. But her goal, she said, is to always tell a story with every song she sings.

“Stories are how we all communicate and connect with each other,” she said. “Storytelling is what helps us make sense of our lives. As someone who has the privilege of dealing with lyrics, it’s important to me to squeeze the juice out of them.”

Salvant’s concert closes out the opening week of Tucson Desert Song Festival’s winter leg, which runs through Feb. 15. Coming up:

True Concord Voices & Orchestra is bringing back composer Jocelyn Hagen's “Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci,” a nine-movement multimedia choral piece the Grammy-nominated ensemble performed in November 2019, in the second half of “Mozart & Hagen: Two Important Encores” Jan. 26-28. Mozart’s C-minor Mass, the first major work True Concord performed, opens the concert. The ensemble, led by founder and music director Eric Holtan and still using its original name Tucson Chamber Artists, was in its third season when it performed Mozart’s Mass in November 2006. For times and venues, visit trueconcord.org.

Tucson Guitar Society is hosting mezzo-soprano Cecilia Duarte Jan. 26 in “Noche Hispanoamericana,” with the mariachi Trio Chapultepec (Vincent A. Pequeño, Israel Alcala and William Carlton Galvez) and special guest percussionist Jesús Pacheco. The ensemble will perform popular Latin standards from the mid-20th century. In a second set, Duarte will team up with guitarist Misael Barraza-Diaz in a program of Spanish songs for voice, guitar and percussion.

This is Duarte’s first time on a Tucson stage since she starred in Arizona Opera’s mariachi opera “El Milagro del Recuerdo” (The Miracle of Remembering) in 2021.

The concert will be held at the University of Arizona School of Music’s Holsclaw Hall, 1017 N. Olive Road. For tickets and details, visit tucsonguitarsociety.org.