Cécile McLorin Salvant's First Orchestral Album Is Out. She Spent Four Years Getting These Ten Songs Into a Studio.

Cécile McLorin Salvant has wanted to make a record with an orchestra for most of her career. She told her label it took almost four years just to get this one into a studio. As of today it exists. "With Every Breath I Take" is out on Nonesuch: ten songs cut with the Metropole Orkest, the Dutch ensemble conducted by Jules Buckley, every chart written by the composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue. It is the first orchestral album of her run, and she waited a long time to make it on her terms.

That run is the context that makes this interesting. Salvant won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010 and spent the back half of the decade as the most decorated young singer in jazz: a MacArthur Fellow, a three-time Grammy winner, the kind of vocalist who treats the American songbook like a script to be acted rather than a pillow to lie on. Records like "For One to Love," "Dreams and Daggers," and "The Window" built that reputation. Her last two, "Ghost Song" and "Mélusine," pushed past it into original writing, French chanson, and medieval melody, a clear signal she had no interest in becoming a heritage act.

An orchestra album is exactly where a singer with that resume usually goes soft. Strings, a famous conductor, a Christmas-window release, the standards played for comfort. Salvant says she built against that on purpose. "I did not choose these songs because they are beautiful, but because they are crucial to me," she told Nonesuch. The tracklist backs the claim.

The songs, and why the picks matter

Look at what she put next to what. Stephen Sondheim shows up twice, with "Send in the Clowns" and "Being Alive," two of the hardest pieces in the theater canon to sing without tipping into either schmaltz or showboating. Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady" and Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" are the standards every jazz singer eventually has to answer for, and Salvant puts them both on one record. Noël Coward's "I'll See You Again" is older and stranger, a 1929 operetta waltz most people under sixty have never heard. There is a Kurt Weill theater song in "Barbara Song," from "The Threepenny Opera," and Michel Legrand's "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg," the title theme from the 1964 Jacques Demy film where every line of dialogue is sung. The album opens with its title track, written by Cy Coleman and David Zippel for the musical "City of Angels," and that one is out now with a lyric video as the album's calling card.

The durations tell you these are not polite three-minute readings. "Barbara Song" runs past eight minutes. "Send in the Clowns" sits near seven. "Being Alive" and "Lush Life" both clear five and a half. Argue, whose own big band work with Secret Society leans toward long-form tension and release, is not arranging these as backdrops for a vocal. He is giving them room to develop, which is the riskier choice and the more honest one.

What an orchestra does to this material

The danger with a singer-plus-orchestra album is obvious: the orchestra becomes a velvet couch, the singer reclines, and everyone calls it elegant. The early read suggests Salvant and Argue avoided the couch. Apple Music's editorial team, hearing it on release, wrote that what the album "gets so right (that other standards albums can get so boringly wrong) is that it doesn't play its source material for sweetness or cosiness, instead injecting familiar and, yes, romantic music with just enough bite and mystery to make it come alive." That matches what Salvant has always done with a small band. The question this record asks is whether she can keep that bite when there are fifty musicians in the room and a conductor between her and them.

The Metropole Orkest is the right partner for the experiment. It is a working pops-and-jazz orchestra, not a symphony moonlighting, and Buckley has spent years pulling it into collaborations with singers and instrumentalists who would chew up a stiffer ensemble. If anyone can keep an orchestra loose enough to follow a singer who bends phrases the way Salvant does, it is this group.

The verdict, on day one

Full honesty: the record is hours old as I write this, and a Salvant album is not something you absorb in one pass. So take this as a first read, not a final grade. On the evidence so far, this is the most ambitious framing she has given her voice, and the song choices are the tell. A singer chasing a prestige cash-in does not put "Barbara Song" and "Lush Life" on the same record and let them run eight and six minutes. She picked the difficult ones. The bet is that the orchestra raises the stakes instead of softening them, and that the drama Salvant finds in a single held vowel survives the move from a trio to a full orchestra.

Start with the title track and "Lush Life." If Strayhorn's tour through every cliche of romantic exhaustion still lands a chill with strings under it, the album works. Salvant said she chose these songs because they are crucial to her. The first listen suggests she meant it.