On 'Ghost Song,' jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant explores the dangers and discomforts of love

JAZZ

Cécile McLorin Salvant, "Ghost Song" (Nonesuch)

Since arriving on the jazz scene about a dozen years ago, this triple Grammy winner has made a practice of shining a black light on the unsavory history of American popular song.

She sings standards, show tunes and old novelties in a taut, flinty, elusively beautiful voice, erring toward material with difficult lyrics and tough places in history. Salvant wins over her audiences by tweaking them slightly: daring them to go there with her — not just into the archive, but toward the darkness of the past.

On "Ghost Song," Salvant has applied that daring-to-go-there ethic to something else: herself, writing music that looks within and doesn't blink.

The album breaks away hard from the sounds and structures of small-group jazz. Some tracks feature a banjo, a flute and hand percussion, but no bassist or drummer. Altogether, the result is her most revealing and rewarding record yet.

A kind of romantic wariness, bordering on pessimism, forms a leitmotif on this album — though it rarely tips into despair. It's there on her blazing cover of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights," and on "Dead Poplar," for which Salvant put music to a letter that Alfred Stieglitz had written to Georgia O'Keeffe, in which he sounds both loving and conflicted. It should tell you something that the sunniest original composition on the album is called "Thunderclouds."

On "Ghost Song," McLorin does covers that could well become new standards: Sting's plangent "Until," and Gregory Porter's triumphant "No Love Dying" (which she deftly combines with "Optimistic Voices," a chipper tune from "The Wizard of Oz").

She has written a moving ballad of her own, too. "Moon Song," a kind of companion piece to the album's bluesier, aching title track, has the aesthetic of classic jazz, but its words meditate on the dangers and discomforts of love in a way that few old standards do.

GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO, New York Times