Three-time GRAMMY® Award winner makes her Paradise Jazz Series debut
Tickets on sale now at dso.org
Detroit, (May 15, 2025) – The Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) welcomes Cécile McLorin Salvant for a sensational program to close out the 2024–25 Paradise Jazz Series on June 6 in Orchestra Hall.
Known for her impactful storytelling, Salvant taps into deep emotions through her artfully curated performances. Her music cannot be contained by one genre—she blends blues, folk, theater, vaudeville, and baroque musical styles to create her unique sound. The freedom of expression exhibited in her vocal performance allows her artistry to flourish as she infuses her own perspectives and experiences into the songs she performs, whether they are covers or her own compositions.
Cécile McLorin Salvant will perform on June 6 at 8 p.m. in Orchestra Hall. Tickets for this performance start at $20 and can be purchased at dso.org or by calling the Box Office at 313.576.5111, open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Currently in its 26th season, the Paradise Jazz Series is named for and honors the legacy of the Paradise Theatre, the historic Detroit jazz venue that was on the site of Orchestra Hall from 1941–1951. The DSO is one of few major American orchestras to present regular jazz programming on its main stage. Learn more about the series at dso.org/jazz.
The Paradise Jazz Series is supported by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, Huntington, MGM Grand Detroit, and DownBeat magazine.
----
Friday, June 6 at 8 p.m.
Orchestra Hall
Singer, composer, and visual artist Cécile McLorin Salvant is a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality that lights up every note she sings. Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, global folk traditions, theater, jazz, and baroque music. She is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded and forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor.
Salvant won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Vocals Competition in 2010. She has won three Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album and has been nominated for three more. In 2020, Salvant received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award. This performance marks her debut on the Paradise Jazz Series.
Please note: Program duration and the inclusion of an intermission are subject to change depending on the program.
----
About Cécile McLorin Salvant
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 lights up every note she sings”.
Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, baroque, and folkloric music. Salvant is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor.
Salvant won the Thelonious Monk 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 the MacArthur Fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released Ghost Song in March 2022, which has since gone onto receive two GRAMMY® nominations as well as appearing on a number of year end best lists for 2022. On March 24, 2023, Nonesuch Records released the highly anticipated follow up, Mélusine, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida of a French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at five, sang in a children’s choir at eight, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager.
Salvant received a bachelor’s in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble while also studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory 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). Salvant 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. It is 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, NY.
About the DSO
The acclaimed Detroit Symphony Orchestra is known for trailblazing performances, collaborations with the world’s foremost musical artists, and a deep connection to its city. Led by Music Director Jader Bignamini since 2020, the DSO makes its home at historic Orchestra Hall within the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center, offering a robust performance schedule that features classical, pops, jazz, and family concerts, plus community performances. Enrico Lopez-Yañez was named Principal Pops Conductor in 2023, trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard serves as the orchestra’s Fred A. Erb Jazz Creative Director Chair, and Tabita Berglund began her tenure as Principal Guest Conductor in the 2024–25 season. A dedication to broadcast innovation and technology began in 1922, when the DSO became the first orchestra in the world to present a live radio broadcast of a concert and continues today with the groundbreaking Live from Orchestra Hall series of free webcasts.
The DSO’s distinguished history of recordings—many led by its renowned music directors—spans nearly a century, beginning with the orchestra’s first 78 rpm singles with Ossip Gabrilowitsch released on the Victrola label in 1928. A steady recording output has continued since then, with highlights including more than 20 releases with Paul Paray for Mercury’s Living Presence series, and 27 under the baton of Neeme Järvi, mostly on the Chandos label. In the 1970s, the DSO took part in the historic Black Composers Series for Columbia Records led by its then-Associate Conductor Paul Freeman and later made several acclaimed recordings with Antal Doráti for the Decca label. More recently, under the direction of Leonard Slatkin, the DSO recorded music by Rachmaninoff, Copland, and John Williams for the Naxos label, earning its first GRAMMY® nomination in 2017 for Copland’s Third Symphony / Three Latin American Sketches. The first recording with Jader Bignamini, of Wynton Marsalis’s Blues Symphony, was released in 2025 on the Pentatone label.
Since its first school concerts a century ago, and particularly since the founding of the Civic Youth Ensembles in 1970, the DSO has been a national leader in bringing the benefits of music education to students, teachers, and families in Detroit and surrounding communities. The DSO remains committed to expanding its participation in the growth and well-being of Detroit through programs like its Detroit Neighborhood Initiative—cultural events co-created with community partners and residents—and Detroit Harmony, a promise to provide an instrument and instruction to any student in the city who wants to learn. With unwavering support from the people of Detroit, the DSO actively pursues a mission to impact lives through the power of unforgettable musical experiences.