About this Performance
Melanie Charles is a Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter, actress, and flutist of Haitian descent, with a creative fluidity spanning jazz, soul, experimental, and Haitian roots music. Charles’ indie release “The Girl with the Green shoes” and “Yall Dont Really Care Black Women” released under the Verve imprint established Charles as a progressive voice in Jazz gaining a handful of features in The New York Times , as well as The Village Voice. “You can hear her collaging her musical DNA into jazz-studded multi-instrumentalism and dipping a toe into the experimental… there’s an uncanny cohesion to Charles’ music.”- Village Voice. Charles graduated from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music with a BFA in vocal jazz performance and has worked with Herlin Riley, Terri Lyne Carrington, Jean Grae, SZA, the Gorillaz, Mark De-Clive Lo, Mach Hommy, Kassa Overall and many others. Her television appearances include Good Morning America , SNL , and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and HBO’s Vinyl . Charles’ passion project “Make Jazz Trill Again” aims to blur the lines between social classes, cultures, genders, sounds and theories to create a world where opposing elements and eras can co-exist through the vehicle of improvised music, podcast conversation, music, event production, and advocacy.
Creative Credits
Cécile McLorin Salvant
CuratorComposer, singer, and visual artist, Cécile McLorin Salvant, is passionate about storytelling and exploring connections between vaudeville, blues, folk traditions, theater, jazz, and baroque music. An eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, power dynamics, twists, and humor once described as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings” by the late, great Jessye Norman. She won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010 and received Grammy Awards for three consecutive albums: “The Window,” “Dreams and Daggers,” and “For One To Love.” In 2020, she received the MacArthur fellowship and Doris Duke Artist Award. Her debut and follow up Nonesuch Records projects, “Ghost Song” (2022) and “Mélusine” (2023), each received two Grammy nominations. Salvant’s latest work, “Ogresse”, arranged by Darcy James Argue, is a musical fable in the form of a cantata that blends several styles of composition resulting in an expansive sonic landscape.