The first thing to know about Oh Snap, Cécile McLorin Salvant’s new suite of original songs, is that it was never intended to leave the hard drive of her computer. Ever.
The singer and composer wrote these short, intensely personal pieces as part of a creative quest: To place spontaneity and joy at the center of her writing process.
After years of writing and recording visionary—and critically acclaimed—Nonesuch albums like Ghost Song (2022)and Mélusine (2023), Salvant challenged herself to approach composition in new ways. “I felt I had lost a connection to music because it was something that I felt I should do in a certain way and do well,” Salvant confides. “I thought, ‘How can I bring music back in close to me, intimately?’ The only way to do that was if it felt like no one would hear it, including other musicians.”
So the vocalist and composer—who’s won the Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy three times and was the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2020—put together a computer music rig. She explored the seemingly limitless tones and combinations, menu by dropdown menu. She was not, she says, looking for some reasonable facsimile of, say, an acoustic bass, but rather some growling bass synth that made her want to play more. Hear more. Sing a melody around it.
“I thought, ‘What would I build if I could just build it alone, based on who I am?’” Salvant says. “I was thinking about how free and playful I am with drawing, which I have no training in, but which gives me so much joy. I’m not in the art scene, so I don’t know the different movements that people find themselves in. And it doesn’t matter what I do. I thought, ‘How could I approach music this way? How could I use music as a way of journaling?’”
“It felt radical to me, to share this,” Salvant says, “in part because I am contending with genre all the time, ever since I’ve been a professional musician—actually, ever since I started studying music in school settings. You are forced to think in terms of genre. You audition for the classical voice class, you audition for the jazz class, you’re bringing certain things into certain classes. Then when, hopefully, you end up becoming a professional musician, you are still contending with genre, you are placed in a category, in these specific lanes that you have to stay in.”
