With Every Breath I Take

LPA

1. With Every Breath I Take
2. Sophisticated Lady
3. Send in the Clowns

LPB

1. Barbara Song
2. Left Over

LPC

1. Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone
2. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
3. I’ll See You Again

LPD

1. Being Alive
2. Lush Life

Nonesuch Records releases Cécile McLorin Salvant’s With Every Breath I Take on June 26, 2026. The album, Salvant’s first with orchestra, features The Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley. Salvant and the ensemble perform timeless songs newly arranged by composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue. The album’s title track, written by Cy Coleman and David Zippel, is available today along with a lyric video. Salvant tours internationally throughout the summer and fall.

Salvant, who has performed with orchestras regularly over the last decade-and-a-half and intended to make an album with one sooner in her career, but logistics and her abundant creative ideas led to other new projects intervening. Having finally found time to make this album, With Every Breath I Take is a different sort of record than it might have been even ten years ago.

“It is a rare opportunity to be able to make an album at this scale, which has been a dream of mine for many years,” Salvant says. “Darcy James Argue wrote stunning arrangements and the Metropole Orkest, conducted by the extraordinary Jules Buckley, gave these stories a cinematic dimension. We overcame quite a few obstacles to even get into the recording studio for this project; it took almost four years for us to do so, and I am so incredibly proud to share it.

“I did not choose these songs because they are beautiful, but because they are crucial to me,” she adds.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner, is a singer and composer bringing historical perspective, a renewed sense of drama, and an enlightened musical understanding to both jazz standards and her own original compositions. Classically trained, steeped in jazz, blues, and folk, and drawing from musical theater and vaudeville, Salvant embraces a wide-ranging repertoire that broadens the possibilities for live performance.

Salvant’s performances range from spare duets for voice and piano to instrumental trios to orchestral ensembles. Her unreleased work Ogresse is an ambitious long-form musical fairy tale that is being made into a feature length animated film. She has performed at national and international venues and festivals such as the Newport Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Village Vanguard, and the North Sea Jazz Festival. Her previous Nonesuch albums, Ghost Song (2022) Mélusine (2023), and Oh Snap (2025) received critical accolades; the former two were both nominated for Grammy Awards. Salvant is also a visual artist, and Oh Snap was named a best album of 2025 by the Guardian, Jazzwise, JazzTimes, and the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll.

The Metropole Orkest, founded in 1945, regularly performs on well-known Dutch music stages such as Tivoli Vredenburg, Melkweg, and the Concertgebouw, as well as many other venues across the country and neighboring countries. Internationally, the Metropole Orkest is a sought-after guest at major festivals including the BBC Proms and Musikfest Bremen. It is also a regular guest at events like ADE, North Sea Jazz, and the Holland Festival. The orchestra has also performed at Pinkpop, Lowlands, Noorderslag, and the 3FM Awards, making it well known and loved by a younger audience.

The orchestra has shared the stage with legends such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Pat Metheny, Brian Eno, Herbie Hancock, and Bono. It also collaborates with contemporary talents like Kovacs, Within Temptation, Snarky Puppy, Gregory Porter, Jacob Collier, Cory Wong, and DOMi & JD BECK. Together with chief conductor Jules Buckley, the orchestra explores the boundaries of contemporary symphonic pop and jazz. In addition to the many concerts, the orchestra regularly records albums with international artists. It has also contributed to thousands of radio and TV broadcasts. Over the years, Metropole Orkest has received no less than twenty-four Grammy nominations and worked on four Grammy-winning productions.

Composer, orchestrator, and conductor Jules Buckley is a musical pioneer who pushes the boundaries of contemporary genres. In 2004 he co-founded the Heritage Orchestra, a flexible chamber ensemble, dedicated to performing new music with a daring approach to crossing and linking musical genres. Buckley has led numerous successful projects as a guest conductor with the Metropole Orkest since 2007; he was appointed chief conductor in 2013. At Metropole Orkest, Buckley has led projects with Snarky Puppy, Laura Mvula, Gregory Porter, Tori Amos, Markus Stockhausen, Michael Kiwanuka, Jonathan Jeremiah, and UK house music duo Basement Jaxx.

Darcy James Argue, “one of the top big band composers of our time” (Stereophile), is best known for Secret Society, an eighteen-piece group “renowned in the jazz world” (New York Times). Argue brings an outwardly anachronistic ensemble into the 21st century through his “ability to combine his love of jazz’s past with more contemporary sonics” and is celebrated as “a syncretic creator who avoids obvious imitation” (Pitchfork). Acclaimed as an “innovative composer, arranger, and big band leader” by the New Yorker, Argue’s accolades include multiple Grammy nominations and a Latin Grammy Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and countless commissions and fellowships.

Dynamic Maximum Tension, Argue’s latest album with Secret Society and his label debut on Nonesuch Records, has been called “his best to date: a work of stunning eclecticism and complexity, but thoroughly accessible, elastic with swing” by Fred Kaplan of Slate, and “simply some of the most exciting music being made right now” by Stereogum’s Phil Freeman. Dynamic Maximum Tension was named one of the best albums of 2023 by DownBeat, NPR, and numerous other outlets, and earned Argue his fourth consecutive Grammy nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.