Carnegie Hall

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.” She has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, baroque, and folkloric music. She is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor.

Salvant won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz 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 WomanChild.

In 2020, Salvant received a MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released the two-time Grammy-nominated Ghost Song in 2022, followed the next year with the anticipated two-time Grammy-nominated Mélusine, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Creole.

Born to a French mother and Haitian father, who raised her in Miami, Salvant started classical piano studies at age 5, sang in a children’s choir at 8, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager.

Salvant received a bachelor’s degree in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendès France in Grenoble while also studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory of Music 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, and country). She wrote the story, lyrics, and music. It is arranged by Darcy James Argue for a 13-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. A performance of Ogresse concludes Salvant’s Carnegie Hall Perspectives series this May. It is also 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.

For more than a decade, Sullivan Fortner has been stretching deep-rooted talents as a pianist, composer, band leader, and uncompromising individualist. The Grammy Award–winning artist and educator received international praise for his collaborative work on The Window alongside Cécile McLorin Salvant, and earned a 2023 Grammy nomination for his provocative arrangement of “Optimistic Voices / No Love Dying” from her 2022 release Ghost Song.

As a soloist, he has released the albums Aria, Moments Preserved, and Solo Game to critical acclaim, the latter being nominated for a 2025 Grammy in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album category. Scheduled for release in 2025, his forthcoming trio recording Southern Nights features Peter Washington and Marcus Gilmore.

The prolific artist has enjoyed creative associations with Wynton Marsalis, Paul Simon, Dianne Reeves, Etienne Charles, and John Scofield. His frequent and longtime collaborators include Ambrose Akinmusire, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Stefon Harris, Kassa Overall, Tivon Pennicott, Peter Bernstein, Nicholas Payton, Billy Hart, Gary Bartz, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, and the late Roy Hargrove.

Playing solo or leading an orchestra, Fortner engages harmony and rhythmic ideas through curiosity and clarity. Growing up in New Orleans, he began playing piano at age 7, earning his bachelor’s degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and master’s from Manhattan School of Music.

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. Additional accolades include the American Pianists Association’s Cole Porter Fellowship, Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship, Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, Shifting Foundation Grant, and Western Jazz Presenters grant.