Cécile McLorin Salvant had long wanted to record an album with full orchestra, arguably one of the most ambitious settings for a jazz vocalist. She had already accomplished more than most singers in the fifteen years since her career began—three Grammy wins, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a string of acclaimed albums, and performing regularly to rapt audiences around the globe. An orchestral album would mark yet another significant, albeit personal, milestone.
When it happened, it happened quickly. In December 2025 Salvant flew to the Netherlands to record with the storied Metropole Orkest, led by conductor Jules Buckley. She arrived at the studio early the following morning, jet-lagged and under pressure to perform—and a scant two days later, she had finished the 10 tracks for With Every Breath I Take, her fourth album for Nonesuch Records.
Despite the challenges—or perhaps because of them—these sessions yielded some of the most compelling vocals of her recording career yet, captured live before the renowned ensemble.
“I thought I was going to have to overdub everything because it seemed that no way would we get what we needed,” Salvant recalls. “But we were listening back to the takes and could see how cohesive everything felt with the orchestra, how natural—it was just miraculous that we were able to pull it off. I couldn’t be more thrilled.”
Salvanthas sung in all types of band configurations over the years, so fronting an orchestra in and of itself was nothing new. And all of the tunes that she’d selected to perform were known quantities, pulled from her existing repertoire, some even going back to her student days. But she had a specific concept for her first strings recording, and choosing the right arranger was of tantamount importance. So, she asked her frequent collaborator, the award-winning bandleader Darcy James Argue, to help execute the arrangements on what would be another career first for her: Each tune on the record would be a ballad.
“I’ve always wanted to do an album that was all ballads,” Salvant says. “And there are specific reasons why I love each of these songs. But behind the decision, I was actually not thinking. It was just about feeling.”
So guided, Salvant chose to open the album with the title track, “With Every Breath I Take,” from the Broadway musical City of Angels (by Cy Coleman and David Zippel). After a touch of strings in the intro, she slips easily into the tune’s moody, noir melody about a romance gone wrong. By the final verse, however, when the protagonist’s longing turns to abject pain, Salvant has smashed any expectation of an anodyne spin through some romantic tropes. Instead, she has made clear her intention to explore all the dark corners of these ballads—and to take the listener with her.
“One of my favorite things about singing is that songs are like little monologues and you can act through them,” she says. “I like squeezing the meaning out of a song, both in the melody and the words, and I like to play with the sound and texture of my voice to highlight those things. I don’t care if it means that I’m sacrificing some beauty or a homogenous sound to make sure that those words come across. The meaning is my biggest priority.”
Beyond her skill in interpreting lyrics, Salvant has a keen ear for brilliance in songwriting. On the album’s second title, for instance, Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” she again examines the dialectic between glamour and despair, this time noting how the iconic tune’s elegant structure drives its emotional impact.
“I just love the way that the melody is written—it has such gorgeous patterns. And the bridge is insane to me, just melodically,” she says. “I actually don’t really think about melodies that much. But the way that melody is made, and how the lyrics sit on top of it just so perfectly, is insane.”
Few composers have understood the emotional power of interplay between words and music better than Stephen Sondheim. Salvant included two of Sondheim’s classic compositions on the album, the first a conversational take on “Send in the Clowns,” a song she’d been performing since her teen years. Over time, as her understanding of the tune’s rueful message deepened, she began to tap into the regret buried in the lyrics, conveyed here through mournful horns and swelling dynamics. The effect is gut-wrenching.
Perhaps the most dramatic—and darkest—moments on the record, however, land in “Barbara Song” from The Threepenny Opera. Shifting spontaneously from whispers to caterwauls, Salvant manages to convey the interior conflict of a woman trapped unwittingly in societal conventions. Raw and pointed, the piece shocks as much today as when composer Kurt Weill and librettist Bertolt Brecht wrote it in 1928.
“To me, it’s very real and very rare to hear this [feeling] expressed, where you have an internal voice that’s wanting to say no, but you can’t say no,” Salvant says. “Lending a voice to this voiceless thing feels really good to me—important and cathartic.”
After the emotive tumult of “Barbara Song,” the gravitational pull of the album begins to shift toward repose with Salvant’s own deceptively sweet composition, “Left Over.” Written more than a decade ago, the song unveils two faces of unrequited love: the hopeful fantasy, inspired by Selena’s pop hit “Dreaming of You,” and the aching loss found in e.e. cummings’ sonnet, “it may not always be so.” With this selection, as with most of the others in this collection, nothing is as simple as it seems—the calm here unsettles, even as it soothes.
“This was the first song I wrote where I really felt like there was something there,” she says. “Of all the songs that I’ve written, I felt that this was the one that would go well [with the other songs] on the album. And there’s a little selfishness here, too, because I wanted to play piano with the orchestra.”
(Salvant reveals that on each of her releases over the years her own playing is quietly “tucked away somewhere.”)
Not all of the album’s moments are serious, though. Midway through, Salvant inserts Buddy Johnson’s “Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone,” a quirky, forgotten gem from the early Songbook contributor. On this version, Salvant uses deep growls and full-throated glissandos to signal the mental anguish that one might feel at the loss of a romance—but her performance is fully tongue-in-cheek.
“There was something so unbelievably exciting about hearing something of that era that I didn’t have even a glimmer of knowledge about,” Salvant says. “And I have just loved that song ever since. I thought it was so funny, kind of slapstick. It’s also a mad song, where someone has just lost their mind. It’s a lot of fun for me to sing.”
This “mad” song entered Salvant’s repertoire through drummer Kenny Washington, whose extensive library of recordings holds several such finds, she reports—reclaiming it for a new generation of jazz listeners seems important.
“I find it to be such an act of love when somebody shares a beautiful, rare piece of music with you,” she says. “So, I received that like a gift, as if somebody had given me a diamond.”
Salvant also acknowledges the significant role that Darcy played in the album’s development, not only in crafting the orchestral sound but in shaping the album’s repertoire. Besides the tour-de-force “Barbara Song,” he also recommended Michel Legrand’s “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg,” with French lyrics by Jacques Demy. In his writing for this title, Darcy elevates the narrative of heartrending loss with florid woodwinds, haunting brass, and an unresolved outro. The perfect frame for Salvant’s beseeching vocals.
“This is such a good song,” Salvant says. “Intuitively, I thought, this is absolutely going to be on this album.”
While Legrand dwells on romantic devastation, the album’s emotional enquiry does not end there. Songwriter Noël Coward is best known for his witty contributions to the Songbook, but he produced his share of heartbreak songs, too, which read as all the more poignant for his usual cheekiness. With his “I’ll See You Again,” Salvant moves the album’s ongoing discussion onto existential terrain, the hidden weight of Coward’s lyrics belying the necessary lightness of her delivery.
“To me, it’s a song about people who have passed on, people we will never see again in this lifetime, other than in our memories of them, in our hearts and thoughts,” Salvant explains. “Actually, I try not to think about them too much, because then I can’t sing. I don’t know if [this song] was meant to be about that, but to me, there’s not even a doubt in my mind. So, when I sing it, that’s what it’s about.”
This subtle turn toward thoughts on irrevocable loss leads the listener into “Being Alive,” the second Sondheim tune and the most profound performance on the album. Sondheim’s exquisite insight into the contradictions of intimate relationships feeds the song’s
emotional escalation, abetted by Darcy’s dramatic orchestration in counterpoint to the vocal line. Once again, his interpretive skill proved key to Salvant’s performance.
“He gave me an acting note on this song, which he never does,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Don’t forget that this is somebody who is making fun of [love], right? So, you need to inject a little bit of acid in the beginning—some resignation and mockery.’ Then, what’s beautiful is how that acidity blossoms into something so vulnerable, somebody wanting what they’ve been making fun of their whole lives. Sondheim—the lyric writing is so impeccable.
“It’s about this fear of being alive. I could cry just saying that—I can relate to that so much. And it’s about togetherness and intimacy, about helping each other and being there for each other. This song is unbelievable.”
For Salvant, the album effectively culminates in “Being Alive.” But she has one final thought for the album—an epilogue of sorts. On the final track, she sings “Lush Life” in an effortless duet with pianist Sullivan Fortner, celebrating not only Billy Strayhorn, the composer, but her own close musical and personal partnership with Fortner.
Curiously, this version adjusts the historical record on the tune, which, as a quintessential standard, has digressed from Strayhorn’s original composition over the decades. It was jazz pianist and educator Bill Charlap who introduced Salvant to Strayhorn’s original melody and phrasing.
“I’d been singing it entirely wrong,” Salvant admits. “There are very specific things in this melody that make it so special and that a lot of singers and instrumentalists get wrong. It doesn’t matter, because they’re still beautiful versions, right? Just not what Billy Strayhorn wrote.”
In this last statement, Salvant hits on a truth that often goes unremarked: Beauty in art comes in many guises. And what lingers most from this album—what will stand the test of time—is not just the inarguable beauty of Salvant’s voice, but the touching humanity of her interpretations.
“You might look at this album as a collection of songs about love, but actually, these songs are about time,” Salvant says. “It’s about what time does to relationships. How we look at the world, how we look at love, how we hear a piece of music or a lyric. Think of the title—what is more indicative of the passage of time than our breath?”
