If music is indeed the universal language, then jazz vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and composer Cyrille Aimée (cyrillemusic.com) literally and figuratively proves the value of being bilingual within it.
Born in 1984 in Samois-sur-Seine, Fontainebleau, France, she both speaks and sings in English, French and Spanish. Her father is French; her mother is from the Dominican Republic — and the family traveled often enough so that by the age of 20, Aimée had lived on four different continents, including in the American jazz mecca of New York City. She’s since added another one, New Orleans, and currently splits her time between the Big Easy and Tacotal, Costa Rica. More on that later.
Perhaps it was all predestined. In addition to growing up in a multicultural, multilingual household filled with dancing, her hometown of Samois-sur-Seine was the location for the Django Reinhardt Festival, annually the largest gathering of gypsy musicians in Europe. Reinhardt (1910-1953), the famed gypsy guitar virtuoso, had once lived in the same village and is buried there. Aimée basked in the history; soaked up the festival scene, and the universal language took root.
“It had a huge impact,” Aimée says by phone from her New Orleans home last month. “When I was a little girl, music seemed like it was meant for dancing, so I identified it with body movement. But when I met the Gypsies, I eventually realized that you could actually make music. For them, it’s the way they live; the air they breathe. Getting to know them, I got to understand that their music is the same as their way of life. It’s music of the moment, where you have to be really present, and improvisation is a big part of it. And I fell in love with all of that.”
Aimée’s latest recording, À Fleur de Peau, is on the London-based imprint Whirlwind and bookends by a decade her major label debut It’s a Good Day (Mack Avenue). But she’d made her own figurative imprint years earlier by wowing Manhattan audiences by night as she attended SUNY Purchase by day. Several live and studio albums were released on small labels while she was winning the Montreux Jazz Festival Competition in 2007 and the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2012.
À Fleur de Peau, Aimée says, literally translates in English to “on the surface of the skin.”
“But it’s also an expression used in French and in Spanish,” says Aimée, “that means to be hyper-sensitive and moved by every little thing. You notice the beauty in everything, and your emotions are raw. That’s how I felt when I was writing this record. These songs are very personal.”
In addition to the New Orleans ode “Beautiful Way” (the first single, complete with a colorful video), there’s a new single on which Aimée indeed bares her soul. “Inside and Out” began six years ago during a trip to Costa Rica, when she found out she was pregnant and had decided to have an abortion when she returned to the United States. She shelved the track, an emotional roller coaster, until building her new house in Tacotal gave her perspective and the confidence to complete it.
“That song was also about completing the house, without me even knowing it at the time,” Aimée says. “But I decided that having taboos about anything isn’t right. It can tend to make something more than what it is. Each song on this album has a life of its own, and a story of its own. It’s really an overall snapshot of a time, and space, in my life.”
After moving to the natural musical melting pot of New Orleans in 2017, Aimée gained further attention with her 2019 Mack Avenue recording Move On: A Sondheim Adventure. Nominated for a Grammy Award for her performance of the musical theater giant’s composition “Marry Me a Little,” some of that positive attention came from an admiring Sondheim himself.
“He came to see perform those shows twice, and sat in the front row,” Aimée says. “He was the one person who could give me the ultimate seal of approval. I hadn’t grown up in the musical theater world, so I wasn’t aware of how renowned he was. If I’d known, I’d have been really scared of him being there. I’d reinvented, maybe even destroyed, the form of some of those songs because I didn’t know the rules. For me, there were none.
“I didn’t want to know much about them, so I could experience and interpret them as if they were mine and make them my own. And I guess he’d never seen anyone do that before. He was crying afterward, and told me, ‘You made me feel like a composer for the first time in my life.’” Aimée said.
In 2021, Aimée’s gypsy spirit took her to that completed new residence in Costa Rica. She’d first visited there several years earlier, and came away so impressed with its natural beauty that she’d designed and supervised the building of her own off-the-grid, open-air three-story jungle sanctuary — with local clay materials, compost toilets and its own recording studio — in the country’s Avocado Mountains. The habitat inspired the rush of creativity evident on À Fleur de Peau, the first album featuring predominantly her original compositions, many of which she promises to perform in Fort Lauderdale.
“I love being in New Orleans, especially around Mardi Gras,” Aimée says. “When it gets colder there, I go to Costa Rica, where I spend a lot of time every year. The new album was inspired by it; the nature, the stillness, the silence. The closest town is a half hour away by car; there’s no drastic change in the weather, and the mosquitoes are not a thing there. Which helps, because I like to essentially live outside.”
Different reviewers have disparate takes on Aimée’s voice. The New York Times’ Stephen Holden described her as a blend of Sarah Vaughan and Michael Jackson; Classicalite’s Mike Greenblatt wrote that hers was “the kind of instantly recognizable voice that has no known precedent.” Indeed, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact sources that led to her often unpredictable phrasing, breath control and spontaneity.
“I like that, and consider it a great compliment,” says Aimée upon hearing the sentiment. “For scat-singing, I’d have to credit Ella Fitzgerald and Chet Baker. For improvising, there are so many, including Django and [Reinhardt’s Hot Club of France band mate and violinist] Stephane Grappelli, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Ahmad Jamal, and Oscar Peterson. I also listen to a lot of different styles, and especially Latin music. It’s hard when people try to label you and put your music in specific boxes. We’re trying to come out of boxes.”
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Sherman, working with Aimée for the first time on À Fleur de Peau, installed an out-of-the-box process that certainly had no precedent to her previous spontaneous, live-in-the-studio recordings. Or even most studio recordings in general, on which drums are captured first with a guiding click track and then other instruments and vocals are overdubbed.
“I feel like this is the first record I’ve done that was recorded in a kind of vertical rather than horizontal way,” she says, “where the whole band was in the studio at once, and we just count it in and record a song. Jake had me put down the guitar and ukulele first, with a click track. He then put down the bass, then the keyboards, and then had me record the vocals. The drums came after that.”
Understanding Aimée’s love for improvisation and left-of-traditional approach to jazz, Sherman took it one step further.
“After I’d recorded the lead vocal tracks, he’d say, ‘Okay, now scat over the whole song; just improvise over the entire track while I record it.’ We’d listen back, and he’d say, ‘Listen to what you did there — those are horn lines, and what you did there is a string section.’ Then he’d send those parts to the appropriate musicians to record and harmonize overdubs. So I was writing the arrangements without even knowing it.”
If You Go
The Cyrille Aimée Quartet performs in the Amaturo Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 S.W. 5th Ave., Fort Lauderdale
When: 7:45 p.m. March 13
Tickets: $65
Info: 954-4620222, www.browardcenter.org