Albums of the Year 2022: Cécile McLorin Salvant - Ghost Song

I tend to run away from all known bandwagons, but I'm on this one. Peter Quinn called Cécile McLorin Salvant’s album Ghost Song “a moving, imaginative, at times laugh-out-loud collection of songs” back in February, and it is a wonderful piece of work on every level.

McLorin Salvant has gone from winning the Thelonius Monk competition in 2010 at the age of 21, to becoming a MacArthur Fellow in the class of 2020. Three of McLorin Salvant’s four albums on Mack Avenue won Grammy Awards, and this, her debut on Nonesuch, must surely win her another. It is a reminder that the greats of our time have phenomenal adaptability and versatility. They can make music naturally and persuasively in a whole range of styles.

On that theme, and staying with vocalists, I am still completely under the spell of having heard Leïla Martial as the star of a gala evening in Paris two weeks ago, switching effortlessly and beguilingly from Bolivian folksongs to bluegrass and the Brel-ish. Her 2022 album Oliphantre shows some of that range and makes me excited to hear what comes next.

From the things I’ve written about for theartsdesk, I still kick myself for not having given Binker Golding’s Dream Like a Dogwood Wild Boy the fifth star it clearly deserves, and also keep in mind some quite ridiculously wonderful clarinet playing from Gabriele Mirabassi on Il Gatto e La Volpe.

And then there’s the tide of “lost albums”. It produces amazing things. Have you heard the one about a baritone saxophonist who walks into a bar in 1972? You need to. Pepper Adams would head off to Canada and play with whatever local rhythm section was placed behind him. And here he is in Edmonton Alberta, with the Tommy Banks Trio, remastered from recently unearthed tapes. First up he calls a tune on which Thad Jones always expected him to play the first solo in the Thad Jones Mel Lewis Orchestra, “Three and One”. Whereas in NYC he would maybe get one chorus on it, here the cascade of imagination and hard blowing keeps going... for 17 minutes. Wonderful stuff.

Another very fine “lost album” is HOME.S, a thoroughly engrossing and thoughtful solo piano album which Esbjorn Svensson’s widow found on the hard drive of the pianist’s computer from the months before his tragic death in a diving accident in 2008.

Two More Essential Albums of 2022

Binker Golding – Dream Like a Dogwood Wild Boy (Gearbox)

Gabriele Mirabassi/ Stefano Zanchino – Il Gatto e La Volpe (EGEA)

Gig of the Year

Ian Shaw at 60. Kings Place, London

Track of the Year 

Esbjörn Svensson – “Gamma” from HOME.S (ACT)

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