Kleinhans Music Hall is pleased to present
SILKROAD ENSEMBLE featuring Cécile McLorin Salvant
Wednesday, April 14
8:00 PM | Doors at 6:30 PM
Main Hall

FEATURING ARTISTS
Cécile McLorin Salvant, vocals
Maeve Gilchrist, harp
Mazz Swift, violin
Niwel Tsumbu, guitar
Francesco Turrisi, frame drums, accordion
Kaoru Watanabe, Japanese flutes and percussion

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

The Silkroad Ensemble is ecstatic to announce GRAMMY-winning vocalist and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant as the special guest for a limited run of performances that promise to be rich, surprising, and full of musical discovery.

This bold collaboration began in 2023 with Salvant’s hauntingly original composition “Have You Seen My Man?”  —a standout track on Silkroad’s American Railroad album, featuring Rhiannon Giddens and released on Nonesuch in 2024. The piece showcases Silkroad’s signature boundary-blurring artistry and group vocals—elements that will take center stage in this new program.

Expect a powerful fusion of improvisation, tradition, and unexpected musical turns as Salvant joins the Ensemble to explore connections across cultures and histories. With family roots in Haiti and France, she brings a deeply personal perspective to the idea of cultural exchange—shaped by a lifelong experience of moving between languages, identities, and stories. For Salvant, Silkroad offers an exciting opportunity to engage with musical traditions beyond her own ones she’s eager to learn from, challenge, and reimagine.

Salvant, a multi-disciplinary visual artist, notes “I make large hand-embroidered drawings on silk organza, which has influenced the way I make and think about music and the interplay between disciplines and mediums.  I’m thinking about the ‘silk’ in ‘Silkroad’, about the connections between textile and song across cultures and throughout history.”

“Cécile McLorin Salvant’s musical vocabulary is a marvel.” —Associated Press

“Salvant is rapidly moving beyond the boundaries of jazz, and I’m gonna follow wherever she leads.” —Stereogum

“In a groundbreaking experiment, Yo-Yo Ma enlisted musicians from the lands of the Silk Road to form a multiethnic touring ensemble performing the music of its members’ countries, “bridging geographic and cultural boundaries with the universal power of music.” —Classical Voice

ABOUT SILKROAD

A Grammy Award-winning musical ensemble, Silkroad is a collective of artists representing dozens of nationalities, traditions and ideas, who use music and art to demonstrate how great beauty can emerge from great difference. The Ensemble strives to engage difference, sparking radical collaboration and music with a purpose, for a more hopeful and inclusive world.

ABOUT CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT

Composer, 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.

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), have also each received two Grammy nominations.

ABOUT MAEVE GILCHRIST

Edinburgh born harpist and composer Maeve Gilchrist has been credited as an innovator on her native instrument and taken the Celtic (lever) Harp to new levels of performance and visibility. Currently based in Kingston,  NY, Maeve tours internationally as a solo artist and composer as well as being a member of the grammy-nominated Silkroad ensemble, Arooj Aftab’s Grammy winning Vulture Prince Ensemble and as part of the multi-disciplinary quartet Edges of Light. She has performed and recorded with such luminaries as Yo-Yo Ma, Frankie Gavin, Esperanza Spalding, Bruce Molsky, Ambrose Akinmusire and Solas. As a composer, Maeve straddles the worlds of folk and classical with pieces including her original concerto for symphony orchestra and harp (a co-commission with Luke Benton), a three-movement Samuel Beckett-inspired piece for harp, string quartet and sound samples which was premiered at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival in the spring of 2018 and a number of other pieces for harp ensembles and strings. She is a regular visiting artist at the Berklee College of Music and has had a number of  instructional books published by Hal Leonard and 80 days publishing. Maeve has released a number of albums to her name on the Adventure Music Record Label as well as being a featured soloist on the  Dreamworks blockbuster movie soundtrack, How to tame your dragon: The hidden world.  Her most recent album, The Harpweaver, has garnered international acclaim including a five-star review from the Irish Times who described it as “buoyant, sprightly and utterly beguiling….a snapshot of a musician at the top of her game”.

Maeve is the co-music director of the WGBH holiday show, a Christmas Celtic sojourn and the co-artistic director of the brand new Rockport Celtic Music festival; an innovative new festival focused on cross-curation and the outer-fringes of Celtic Music.

ABOUT MAZZ SWIFT

Critically acclaimed as one of America’s most talented and versatile performers today, Violin/Vox/Freestyle Composition artist Mazz Swift has engaged audiences all over the world with the signature weaving of song, melody and improvisation that they call MazzMuse. As a singer, composer and Juilliard-trained violinist who plays electronic and acoustic instruments, Mazz has performed and recorded with a diverse accumulation of artists including The Silkroad Ensemble, William Parker, Butch Morris, Jason Lindner, James “Blood” Ulmer, Vernon Reid, Valerie June, Whitney Houston, DJ Logic, Kanye West, D’Angelo. Mx. Swift is a 2021 United States Artist and 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, currently working on a series of compositions that involve conducted improvisation, and that are centered around protest, spirituals, and the Ghanaian concept of ‘Sankofa’: looking back to learn how to move forward.

ABOUT NIWEL TSUMBU

Niwel Tsumbu​ is a guitarist and singer who grew up with the hip-swinging Soukous music from the Democratic Republic Of The Congo. Strongly influenced by guitarists such as Paco de Lucia, Luambo Makiadi, Baden Powell and Joe Pass, Niwel Tsumbu has amalgamated these different styles and blurred the boundaries of African, Classical and Jazz music with his amazing virtuosity, passion and graceful guitar playing.

ABOUT FRANCESCO TURRISI

Francesco Turrisi has been defined as a “musical alchemist” and a “musical polyglot.” He has released five critically acclaimed albums as a leader and two as co-leader (“Tarab” a cross boundary innovative ensemble that blends Irish and Mediterranean traditional music, and “Zahr” a project that looks at connections between southern Italian traditional music and Arabic music).

ABOUT KAORU WATANABE

Composer and instrumentalist Kaoru Watanabe’s work is rooted in traditional Japanese performing arts and infused with experimental and improvisational elements. His signature skill of merging the music, literature, and aesthetic philosophies of Japan with disparate styles and mediums has made him a highly sought-after collaborator, working with such iconic artists as André 3000, Yo-Yo Ma, Wes Anderson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Laurie Anderson, Jason Moran, and Japanese National Living Treasure Bando Tamasaburo. The son of two St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians, Watanabe studied jazz at the Manhattan School of Music before moving to Japan to study noh-kan flute with Matsuda Hiroyuki and Edo Matsuri Bayashi with Suzuki Kyosuke in Tokyo. He then moved to Sado, a remote island in the Sea of Japan, where he undertook a rigorous two-year apprenticeship with the groundbreaking Japanese taiko performing arts ensemble Kodo. During this time, he trained in traditional Japanese folk dancing, singing, drumming, woodworking, tea ceremony, rice farming, running, Noh, and Kyogen. Watanabe then became the first American to join the ensemble as a performing member, serving as an ambassador of Japanese music on the world’s greatest stages and as artistic director of their annual music festival, leading collaborations with luminaries such as Zakir Hussain, Giovanni Hidalgo, and Tamangoh. After a decade in Japan, Watanabe returned to New York to pursue a solo career, performing with and composing for top artists of their respective genres, such as flamenco dancer Eva Yerbabuena, Mongolian Official State Morin Khuur player Tserendorj, multiple Grammy Award-winning rapper Residente, visual artist Simone Leigh, Rhiannon Giddens and the Silkroad Ensemble, and many others, all while championing the essential qualities of Japanese flutes and percussion. In 2024, Watanabe launched Bloodlines Interwoven, a multifaceted commissioning project, festival, and ensemble celebrating heritage, immigration, and diaspora through music, cuisine, and storytelling.