2023 · Album
Mélusine
Recorded April 2022, Brooklyn · Nonesuch Records · Produced by Cécile McLorin Salvant, Tom Korkidis
A French Myth Gets the Salvant Treatment
Salvant takes a medieval French folktale and makes it feel genuinely strange and alive.
If you know Cécile McLorin Salvant mostly from her jazz standards work, Mélusine (2023) will catch you off guard in the best way. It's a concept album built around the old French legend of Mélusine — a half-woman, half-serpent figure from medieval folklore — and Salvant leans hard into the weirdness of that source material. Most of the album is sung in French, which already separates it from the bulk of her catalog, and the mood sits somewhere between fairy tale and fever dream. This isn't a glossy jazz-pop crossover move. It's odder and more committed than that.
Salvant produced the album alongside Tom Korkidis, recording in Brooklyn in April 2022, and the result has a handmade, slightly theatrical feel. The arrangements aren't trying to replicate classic jazz settings — there's a folky, chamber-music quality to much of it, with acoustic textures that suit the mythological subject matter. Tracks shift in tone quickly: one moment delicate and playful, the next genuinely unsettling. Salvant's voice is the constant, and she uses it with real intelligence, treating the Mélusine story not as a costume but as something she's actually thought through.
Who is this album for? Probably not someone looking for a relaxed late-night jazz record. It rewards attention and a bit of patience with its concept. Fans already invested in Salvant's voice and her willingness to take risks will get the most out of it. Newcomers might do better starting with an earlier record before circling back here. But for what it's trying to do — take a folkloric story seriously, in French, on a jazz label, in 2023 — it largely pulls it off.
Who's playing
Paul Sikiviedouble bass
Luques Curtisdouble bass
Aaron Diehlpiano
Sullivan Fortnerpiano
Godwin Louisalto saxophone
Kyle Pooledrums
Lawrence "Lo" Leathersdrums
Obed Calvairedrums
Weedie Braimahpercussion
Where next?
More by Cécile McLorin Salvant
All 9 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
