A mix of studio and live tracks, the latter recorded at the Village Vanguard, the 17 songs of The Window, an album of duets with the brilliant Sullivan Fortner, offer yet more astonishing examples of McLorin Salvant’s captivating art. She possesses not only one of the most original imaginations in modern jazz, but also succeeds in reaching emotional depths that few other vocalists reach, whether breathing new life into Buddy Johnson’s ‘Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone’, delivering an enchanting original (‘À Clef’), or dusting down a hidden gem (Cole Porter’s ‘Were Thine That Special Face’). Running through the album like an idée fixe is a lyrical undercurrent of wishing to be someplace else, from the singer’s striking re-imaginings of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Visions’ and Dori Caymmi’s ‘Obsession’ to the Bernstein/Sondheim classic ‘Somewhere’. Bolstered throughout by Fortner’s bold, exciting pianism, few recordings this year have been as unfailingly engaging, uplifting and accomplished as The Window.

Jazzwise spoke to Cécile McLorin Salvant about the album

The reimagining of ‘One Step Ahead’ now serves as a homage to Aretha Franklin. What did Aretha mean to you personally?

I grew up listening to her. My mom was a big fan and we’d listen in the car, blasting her songs loudly. She was incredible. Her voice is comfort and nostalgia for me.

The jump blues pianist and bandleader Buddy Johnson isn’t a name that crops up a lot today. What drew you to ‘Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone’?

I like songs about someone who thinks they are losing their mind. I also find the trope of the hysterical woman, the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, to be infuriating, reductive, and therefore rife with humour. The wonderful drummer Kenny Washington played that record for me and I was hooked.

Pianist Sullivan Fortner’s versatility is astonishing. What do you most admire in his playing?

He is creative, funny, sensitive, spontaneous. It feels like he can do anything, he is completely free at the piano and it is so much fun to sing with him.

Your all-inclusive choice of repertoire keeps the music’s vaudevillian element in play. Why do you think this element of the music is important?

I don’t know if it is important, maybe nothing is important! I am drawn and repulsed by a lot of things that probably show up in some way in my music. But I can see the legacy of vaudeville in a lot of American music. I love vaudeville, but have issues with it.

Does stripping back to voice and piano allow you to take more risks with the music?

I’m not sure. I’m not even sure it feels that much like a ‘stripping back’. I feel that Sullivan sounds fuller than a big band sometimes. As for the risk element, it’s an effort to keep that present no matter what the context is. We can stretch things out, we can change keys, we can go in another direction if we want and the adjustment is simpler because it’s only one person to check in with. It would be riskier to try that with a big band. For me, it’s less about the fact that it’s a duo and more about the fact that it’s Sullivan.

The version of ‘The Peacocks (A Timeless Place)’ is almost a self-contained mini-suite. Could you describe your overall approach to this song?

I try to follow the path of the words. Norma Winstone wrote lyrics to that song that still seem to be revealing themselves to me, slowly. I like to latch on to a phrase and see how it ties things together, how it builds. Over time it can change, but when I first sang ‘The Peacocks’, it was “take a final look around you, hold the memory forever”. Memory, time, and finality are fascinating, and terrifying, and deceiving. You can hold on to that lyric for a while and go a lot of places with it.