Cécile McLorin Salvant does not arrive anywhere without something worth saying. Three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a compositional imagination that ranges freely from vaudeville to blues to baroque — she arrives at Kleinhans Music Hall on Wednesday, April 14 alongside the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble for what the ensemble itself describes as a limited run of performances “rich, surprising, and full of musical discovery.”
About the Show
The collaboration traces back to American Railroad, Silkroad’s 2024 Nonesuch album conceived by Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens to surface overlooked contributions of Indigenous Americans, African Americans, Chinese, Irish, Japanese, and other immigrant communities who built the Transcontinental Railroad. Salvant’s contribution, Have You Seen My Man?, tells the story of a woman walking a train track “joined by generations of wanderers who cannot ride the train though it was built by their labor,” relying on “allusive lyrics, a familiar blues mode and steady rhythmic motion” to convey, in Silkroad’s own framing, “the secret that no one knows.” What began as a 2023 commission has become a limited run of collaborative performances.
The April 14 program brings Salvant’s voice together with Maeve Gilchrist on harp, Mazz Swift on violin, Niwel Tsumbu on guitar, Francesco Turrisi on frame drums and accordion, and Kaoru Watanabe on Japanese flutes and percussion. Silkroad frames the evening as “a powerful fusion of improvisation, tradition, and unexpected musical turns,” an accurate description of how the ensemble has operated since Yo-Yo Ma founded it in 2000. Under the current artistic direction of Giddens, the ensemble won the Grammy for Best World Music Album for Sing Me Home (Sony, 2016). Their method of drawing on traditions from across the globe to find what they share is one Salvant’s own practice mirrors closely.
Salvant is a singer and composer the MacArthur Foundation describes as bringing “historical perspective, a renewed sense of drama, and an enlightened musical understanding to both jazz standards and her own original compositions.” Her nearly four-octave vocal range spans deep, husky lows to clear high notes. The Associated Press called her musical vocabulary “a marvel”; Stereogum put it as an open invitation: “Salvant is rapidly moving beyond the boundaries of jazz, and I’m gonna follow wherever she leads.”
Venue & Logistics
Kleinhans Music Hall is at 3 Symphony Circle in Buffalo, a consistent anchor of the western New York concert calendar. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; the performance begins at 8 p.m.
Tickets
No specific ticket price was available from sources at the time of publication. The Kleinhans Box Office notes that all ticket prices are “all in” (fees included), with no exchanges or refunds. For availability and pricing, contact the box office at (716) 885-5000 or buy tickets.