“It’s fantastic to see a young musician with this much intelligent control over her material… her final high note on “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” was basically a mic-drop, an audience slayer.” – The New York Times
When Cécile McLorin Salvant arrived at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC to compete in the finals of the 2010 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, she the youngest finalist. When she walked away with first place in the jazz world’s most prestigious contest, the buzz began almost immediately and only intensified in the months leading up to the launch of her Mack Avenue Records debut, WomanChild. “She has poise, elegance, soul, humor, sensuality, power, virtuosity, range, insight, intelligence, depth and grace,” Wynton Marsalis asserts “She radiates authority,” critic Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times and a few weeks later his colleague Stephen Holden announced that “Ms. McLorin Salvant has it all…. If anyone can extend the lineage of the Big Three—Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald—it is this 23-year-old virtuoso.”