It’s a night of brilliantly crafted songs delivered by two artists who know how to inhabit a story. Silvana Estrada sings from down deep, telling her soulful coming-of-age stories in a voice that embraces the legacy of Latin American song and carries into the 21st century. Playing the Venezuelan cuatro guitar, she sings iconoclastic tales that cut straight to the heart. She’s performed and recorded with artists including Natalia Lafourcade (who, like Silvana, grew up outside Veracruz) as well as Andrew Bird, Devendra Banhart, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Following the release of her 2022 debut Marchita, which Rolling Stone called “gorgeously understated, guided by her gauzy voice and rich, acoustic arrangements,” she was awarded the 2022 Latin Grammy for Best New Artist.

Cécile McLorin Salvant applies her passion for storytelling to find the connections between vaudeville, blues, folk traditions from around the world, theater, jazz, and baroque music. She’s an eclectic curator with an adventurous spirit, unearthing rarely recorded songs from the past: forgotten tales with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor. Her albums The Window, Dreams and Daggers, and For One to Love won consecutive Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammys, and in 2020, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship. Her 2022 album Ghost Song was hailed by Downbeat, who wrote in a 4.5-star review, “Her wordplay teases, taunts, and tests in a way that forces her to not just sing a lyric, but dive into roles with the zeal of a method actor.