Cecile McLorin Salvant – Dreams And Daggers (180g 3LP)

Label: Mack Avenue Records MAC 1120 LP

Grammy Award-Winning Jazz Vocalist On 180g 3LP!

2018 Stereophile Magazine Record to Die For!

2017 Grammy Award Winner:
• Best Jazz Vocal Album: Dreams And Daggers

Cut by Kevin Gray at Acoustech Mastering – 180 Gram Virgin Vinyl – Pressed at RTI .

GRAMMY® Award-winning vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant has had a remarkable rise to stardom in her professional career, and she’s taken another big leap forward with Dreams and Daggers, her third album for Mack Avenue Records.

“The songs on this album are of dreams and daggers. The daggers have been used at times to attack, at times to defend. For power, no doubt, to take it, to keep it. The dreams are the ones I caught looking out a window, or from the light sleep before the deep. I don’t always know what they mean, but they are the ones I was able to keep. And yet dreams can be desires too. I wrote them down to make them true. That we may bring our wildness into view. That we may be unruled and unruly.” – Cecile McLorin Salvant

Yes, the piano, bass and drums are captured naturally both timbrally and spatially but more to the point is the remarkable presentation of Ms. Salvant’s voice, which is out front riding on a velvety cushion of air. As she works the microphone the room acoustics enter naturally behind her. It’s quite a remarkable engineering job by Damon Whittemore and Todd Whitelock, mixed by Whitelock at ValveTone Studios. Mark Wilder mastered at Battery Studios. Kevin Gray cut lacquers from 192/24 bit files. RTI pressed. Yes, the sound more than favorably compares with those famous Bill Evans albums. You’re in the club with Cécile and her trio and it’s a place you’ll want to be!
Sound 101/10 Music 11/10 Michael Fremer Analogplanet.com

This set, recorded live at the Village Vanguard, is destined to join Bill Evans’s two live Vanguard albums as a classic of performance and sound.
-Michael Fremer, Stereophile Magazine Record To Die For 2018

“You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.” – Wynton Marsalis

Grammy Award-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant has had a remarkable rise to stardom in her professional career, and she’s taking another big leap forward with Dreams and Daggers, her third album for Mack Avenue Records. Co-produced with Al Pryor and recorded live at the Village Vanguard and the DiMenna Center, Cécile appears in multiple configurations here with superb accompaniment from the likes of Aaron Diehl (piano), Paul Sikivie (double bass), Lawrence Leathers (drums) and the Catalyst Quartet (Karla Donehew Perez & Suliman Tekalli – violins, Paul Laraia – viola and Karlos Rodriguez – cello).

In 2013, McLorin Salvant made her Mack Avenue debut with WomanChild, garnering a Grammy Award-nomination, NPR Music’s pick for “Best Jazz Vocal Album of the Year,” and three placements in DownBeat’s critic’s poll as “Jazz Album of the Year,” “Top Female Vocalist,” and “Best Female Jazz Up and Coming Artist of the Year,” among many other accolades. Her 2015 follow up release, For One To Love, won the Grammy Award for “Best Jazz Vocal Album.”

“Salvant has a supple, well-trained voice with spot-on pitch. (No vibrato-teases; no meandering warbles passing as melisma). Her low notes go from husky to full-bodied; her high notes float purely and cleanly. When she scats, it’s not an ego trip but a musical game, where notes and syllables get to shape-shift.” – The New York Times Magazine

the best jazz vocal album in a decade, maybe in longer than that
-Fred Kaplan, Stereophile

Recorded live at the Village Vanguard and the DiMenna Center