The first thing to know about Oh Snap, Cécile McLorin Salvant’s new suite of original songs, is that it was never intended to leave the hard drive of her computer. Ever.
The singer and composer wrote these short, intensely personal pieces as part of a creative quest: To place spontaneity and joy at the center of her writing process.
After years of writing and recording visionary—and critically acclaimed—Nonesuch albums like Ghost Song (2022) and Mélusine (2023), Salvant challenged herself to approach composition in new ways. “I felt I had lost a connection to music because it was something that I felt I should do in a certain way and do well,” Salvant confides. “I thought, ‘How can I bring music back in close to me, intimately?’ The only way to do that was if it felt like no one would hear it, including other musicians.”
So the vocalist and composer—who’s won the Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy three times and was the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2020—put together a computer music rig. She explored the seemingly limitless tones and combinations, menu by dropdown menu. She was not, she says, looking for some reasonable facsimile of, say, an acoustic bass, but rather some growling bass synth that made her want to play more. Hear more. Sing a melody around it.
“I thought, ‘What would I build if I could just build it alone, based on who I am?’” Salvant says. “I was thinking about how free and playful I am with drawing, which I have no training in, but which gives me so much joy. I’m not in the art scene, so I don’t know the different movements that people find themselves in. And it doesn’t matter what I do. I thought, ‘How could I approach music this way? How could I use music as a way of journaling?’”
Salvant began this inquiry during the pandemic, and says she quickly found herself in the wide-open wilderness of “what if?,” chasing down—and then capturing—whatever wild ideas popped into her head. She layered sounds into thick textures, constructed verse sections and hooks and then, through the magic of cut-and-paste, gleefully rearranged them. Among these were quiet folk songs, party tracks with beats, careening samba grooves, and meditations on meditation.
She felt no need to evaluate the results. It was fun, Salvant recalls, so she kept going. Significantly, she didn’t stop to think about who the music was “for,” or who might hear it. “Nothing really was planned or calculated in a way that was in consideration of the listener other than myself as the listener. The structures of all the songs, I would say, or of most of the songs, are completely tailor-made to my own enjoyment. That might sound really self-indulgent, but it’s the truth. Eventually, I opened up, but yes, it was meant to be in those little folders on my desktop.”
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Salvant continued working on these songs steadily over the next four years in private, as a personal project, in the same way she works on her art and embroidery: slowly and intentionally, at her own pace, with no external pressures. As she kept tinkering with them, little by little, she grew more confident and realized she was ready to share this more personal side of her voice.
Her first instinct was to go with the initial inspiration and not add instruments or re-record anything. Then, she says, she thought about how some of the tunes might sound with slightly expanded instrumentation. The finished Oh Snap reflects a variety of approaches: Three tracks were recorded live in the studio with Salvant’s trio, another was done in a hotel room on tour, another in a friend’s studio in Brooklyn, and others, captured on Salvant’s computer, feature Sullivan Fortner adding layers of keyboard and synthesizer.
Salvant says the majority of the music was recorded outside of the studio environment. And when she did enter the studio, she was not chasing perfection: “It was in that mood of keeping things a little bit messy and a bit more gritty and raw.” Some of her home recordings feature lavish and unorthodox reverb and vocal effects, and when she tried to re-record the vocals, she wasn’t happy with the results. “I think the studio environment for me can be a little bit paralyzing and it can create a kind of sheen on my voice, a kind of plastic cover on my voice,” she says. “I tried to replace the home vocals on a few things. And it just didn’t work.”
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Oh Snap is unlike anything Salvant has done before, and not just because of its homemade origin. Though her writing process was and is rooted in improvisation, this material reflects her upbringing as a child of the 1990s—the Backstreet Boys were her band for a while. Only a few pieces connect in a direct way to the jazz tradition—a brazen move for an established vocalist.
“It felt radical to me, to share this,” Salvant says, “in part because I am contending with genre all the time, ever since I’ve been a professional musician—actually, ever since I started studying music in school settings. You are forced to think in terms of genre. You audition for the classical voice class, you audition for the jazz class, you’re bringing certain things into certain classes. Then when, hopefully, you end up becoming a professional musician, you are still contending with genre, you are placed in a category, in these specific lanes that you have to stay in.”
Salvant has pushed back against that obligation with bracing, creatively challenging projects. Her original works—most recently Ghost Song and Mélusine—have drawn from a range of cultures and musical styles, reflecting her eclectic tastes as a listener.
“As somebody who was born in 1989 and brought up in the ’90s, I listened to an absurd amount of pop music,” Salvant says matter-of-factly. “I listened to folkloric music from all over the world, I listened to classical music, I would go rummage through my sister’s collection of grunge cassettes.”
“To have to shut all of that out and just say, ‘I’m going to just focus on jazz, and then I’m going to defend it as if it was the inheritance of my ancestors, which it is not, but still I’m going to defend what it is and what it means and why it’s important.’ Well, that is a lot... You’re dealing with that in front of an audience that’s coming to hear you sometimes based on genre. You’re also dealing with that, especially, when you sit down to write a new song.”
To escape that limiting thinking, Salvant says, she turned inward. Did the work of uncovering by herself. “This was a moment for me to say, ‘What does my music sound like, my actual music that’s in my head that I’m hearing for real?’”
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Turns out the music Cécile McLorin Salvant hears in her head is far more vital and multi-faceted than any tradition-upholding songbook exercise could ever be. There are breathy dance tracks. A voice memo with Salvant and Fortner harmonizing a verse of the Commodores’ 1977 hit “Brick House.” A gorgeous setting of a Bashō haiku.
That’s not all. Salvant went all in—abusing the Auto-Tune pitch-correcting software for weirdness, drenching her vocals in otherworldly reverb and other effects. She points to the title track as an example of this experimentation: “I wanted it to be very dark and to be just dripping wet, dripping in reverb and unclear. I wanted there to be a sort of muddiness there. No one would want to do that. No engineer in their right mind would want to do that to someone, especially not a jazz singer.” Different story when she’s at the controls, because, as she says, “I have no respect for my vocal. You know what I mean? I have no desire to beautify it. I have no respect for it. It’s just my voice. I can do whatever.”
Oh Snap collapses the distance between singer and listener in disarming ways. Salvant uses her abundant gifts for phrasing and gestural emphasis the way she might on stage, but these songs operate at whisper range; they thrive on contrasts between soft and loud dynamics, and spare and dense textures. The up-close proximity flattens performative customs, opening up space for real talk. Whether the subject is guiding life principles or discussions of the stickiness of sweat, she stays up close and gravitates toward an unsparingly blunt honesty.
The declaration that opens “Anything But Now” is typically forthright: “I spend a lot of time thinking about doing things instead of doing them.” It’s a self-aware thought expressed in a spirit of blithe irreverence. And though this lyric, like others on the album, might have started as a diving-deep journal entry, Salvant animates it, radiating lightness. She sounds not only as though she’s at peace with what she’s sharing—she’s having fun expressing herself in this unguarded way, using these tools.
Salvant says that pleasure within the process is what she’d been missing.
“Something about this that is different from everything else that I’ve done,” Salvant says, “is that I recorded almost all of the vocals at home. When I record at home, either into my iPhone or into a fancy microphone that somebody might lend me, I sing differently. No one’s there. There’s no engineer. There are no musicians. I’m not on the clock. There’s no one waiting for me to hurry up and get a good take. There’s no pressure.
“A lot of the recording was done in the morning, in my pajamas. I do sing differently in those conditions with just the morning coffee. No one is there, so you’re getting a side of me that is actually extremely personal and extremely intimate. Not intimate in the way that we say, ‘Oh, it’s an intimate jazz club.’ No. It’s like literally pajama intimate.”
July 2025