For one to love

"A brilliantly realized follow-up to [Salvant's] Grammy-nominated 2013 effort, WomanChild, (...) For One to Love is at its core a small-group jazz album featuring a thoughtfully curated set of standards and originals. However, with Salvant at the mike, backed here with nuanced skill by pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Paul Sikivie, and drummer Lawrence Leathers, it's also a series of virtuoso performances, each one seemingly more engaging and emotionally resonant than the last. Conceptually centered around notions of romantic love (...) the album finds Salvant further demonstrating the poetic compositional skills and feminist themes that helped make WomanChild so much more than just a solid album from an accomplished jazz vocalist ... Heartbreaking and beautiful".

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"At only 25, this half-Haitian, half-Guadeloupean vocalist is winning every jazz award going, despite rejecting the usual tricks of the jazz virtuoso. On her second LP, there's no scatting or replicating horn solos. This is more like heightened music-theatre, enunciated with authority and polished with elaborate sonic costume changes. Salvant can warble in French and growl her way through old blues belters, but she's even better at recasting standards. On Wives and Lovers, she turns Hal David's simpering lyric into a demented psychodrama, with pianist Aaron Diehl's scribbly accompaniment sounding like a cartoon soundtrack".

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