In 2015, the young American singer Cécile McLorin Salvant won a Grammy with her album For One to Love, and this live follow-up from New York’s Village Vanguard, with her classy trio and an occasional string quartet, reworks plenty of standard songs (there are a few shrewd originals too) with audacity, imagination and unerring dramatic timing. Some say Salvant largely avoids jazz models, but the great Betty Carter is a significant influence, even if Salvant and her fine pianist Aaron Diehl arrange the plotlines and payoffs of songs much more meticulously. But, unjazzily calculated or not, Dreams and Daggers is an awesome performance. The Kurt Weill/Langston Hughes piece Somehow I Never Could Believe, is a trembling, sublimely controlled balance of nostalgia and anger; the piano-less Runnin’ Wild is a sure-footed, rhythm-stretching sprint, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was switches lustrous whispers for coquettish yelps that bring cheers, while a terrifying My Man’s Gone Now is a great interpretation of the Gershwin classic. Superficially, this is a straightforward set; musically, it’s anything but.
