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.

The Knights are a collective of adventurous musicians dedicated to transforming the orchestral experience and eliminating barriers between audiences and music. Driven by an open-minded spirit of camaraderie and exploration, they inspire listeners with vibrant programs rooted in the classical tradition and passion for artistic discovery. The Knights started with late-night chamber-music reading parties with friends at the home of violinist Colin Jacobsen and cellist Eric Jacobsen. The Jacobsen brothers serve as artistic directors of The Knights, with Eric Jacobsen as conductor.

Proud to be known as “one of Brooklyn’s sterling cultural products ... known far beyond the borough for their relaxed virtuosity and expansive repertory” (The New Yorker), the orchestra has toured extensively across the United States and Europe since its founding in 2007. The Knights’ roster boasts musicians of remarkably diverse talents, including composers, arrangers, singer-songwriters, and improvisers, who bring a range of musical influences to the group, from jazz to indie rock music. The Knights are celebrated globally, appearing across the world’s most prestigious stages, including those at Tanglewood, the Ravinia Festival, Kennedy Center, Vienna’s Musikverein, and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. The orchestra has collaborated with many renowned soloists, including Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, Béla Fleck, and Gil Shaham.

In the 2025–2026 season at Carnegie Hall, The Knights blend timeless tradition with bold innovation in the orchestra’s signature style. Additionally, The Knights’ Rhapsody project, a multi-year commissioning initiative inspired by the 2024 centennial of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, continues through 2027. For the orchestra’s complete schedule and a list of artistic partners and collaborative projects, visit theknightsnyc.com.

Already established as one of classical music’s most exciting and innovative conductors, Eric Jacobsen combines fresh interpretations of the traditional canon with cutting-edge collaborations across musical genres. Hailed by The New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” Jacobsen—as both a conductor and a cellist—has built a reputation for engaging audiences with creative and collaborative programming. He is artistic director and co-founder of The Knights, the uniquely adventurous New York City–based chamber orchestra. The ensemble—founded with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen—grew out of late-night music reading parties with friends, good food and drink, and conversation. Current projects include a multi-year Rhapsody project as well as a residency at Carnegie Hall.

Jacobsen also currently serves as music director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, as he continues to pioneer both orchestras’ programming and community engagement in new and exciting directions. A frequent guest conductor, Jacobsen has established continuing relationships with the Colorado Symphony, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Oregon Bach Festival, and Dresden Musikfestspiele. Recent engagements also include concerts with the Omaha Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and Grant Park Festival.

Jacobsen brings joy, storytelling, and a touch of humor to what he describes as “musical conversations” that delight audiences around the world, including those who do not traditionally attend classical music concerts. He is married to Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan, and they have a daughter.

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.

Bassist David Wong was born and raised in New York City and graduated from The Juilliard School in 2004. He has studied with Orin O’Brien (New York Philharmonic) and Ron Carter. He is currently a member of Roy Haynes’s Fountain of Youth band, the Charles McPherson Quintet, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. He was also the last bass player in the Heath Brothers Quartet led by Jimmy Heath and Albert “Tootie” Heath. He was part of Hank Jones’s Great Jazz Trio and is featured on the piano master’s last recording. Wong is on faculty at Temple University, Purchase College, The New School, and The City College of New York.

Drummer Kush Abadey has been enjoying a fast-paced and eclectic career for years. At age 16, he joined the quintet led by Grammy Award–winning trumpeter Wallace Roney and has since worked with Ravi Coltrane, Chris Potter, Melissa Aldana, Joel Ross, Tomasz Stańko, Jeremy Pelt, Gilad Hekselman, Seamus Blake, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Frank Lacy, Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, and Buster William. Recent highlights include performing for Michelle Obama at the White House and becoming the youngest artist ever to be selected for the Strathmore Artist in Residence Program. In 2009, Abadey was awarded a Presidential Scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston. While at Berklee, he was able to collaborate and study with some of the top musicians in the business, including Terri Lyne Carrington, Ralph Peterson, and Darren Barrett. In 2012, he moved to New York City and currently performs, records, and tours internationally with various renowned musicians and groups.

Acclaimed Grammy Award–winning mandolinist, singer, songwriter, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Chris Thile is a multifaceted musical talent, described by The Guardian as “that rare being: an all-round musician,” and hailed by NPR as a “genre-defying musical genius.” Thile is a founding member of the highly influential string bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek, and has collaborated with countless luminaries from Yo-Yo Ma to Fiona Apple to Brad Mehldau. For four years, he hosted public-radio favorite Live from Here (formerly A Prairie Home Companion). With his broad outlook, Thile creates a distinctly American canon and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike, giving listeners “one joyous arc, with the linear melody and vertical harmony blurring into a single web of gossamer beauty” (The New York Times).

Throughout the last year, Thile has been touring with Nickel Creek in support of the critically acclaimed 2023 release Celebrants, and captivating audiences with a playfully ambitious biographical composition entitled ATTENTION! (a narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra). Additionally, he has been focused on the production of The Energy Curfew Music Hour, a new musical variety show. Created with Claire Coffee and featuring Punch Brothers, season one is available on Audible and all podcasting platforms. Most recently, Thile debuted his new one-man show The Manhattan Variations in New York City’s Little Island about finding oneself in a little cocktail bar on the Lower East Side.