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PHOTO: ESPERANZA SPALDING (b. October 18, 1984)
Esperanza Spalding
(b. October 18, 1984)
Biography by Matt Collar
Bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding is a Grammy-winning performer with an ambitiously cross-pollinated approach to contemporary jazz. Hailed as a prodigy in her teens, she garnered wider attention in the 2000s with the release of her debut, Junjo, and its follow-up, Esperanza, the latter of which topped the contemporary jazz charts. In 2010, she won Best New Artist at the Grammys, an accolade that helped propel her third album, Chamber Music Society, into the Billboard Top 40 as the best-selling contemporary jazz album that year. At the same time, Spalding won respect as a teacher, becoming the youngest faculty member at the Berklee College of Music. She took home a second Grammy for 2012's Radio Music Society. Spalding has remained a forward-thinking maverick artist, issuing a series of increasingly concept-driven albums, including 2016's Emily's D+Evolution, 2019's Twelve Little Spells, and 2021's Songwrights Apothecary Lab, all of which found her moving far afield of jazz into art rock, R&B, Afro-Latin styles, neo-prog, and experimental pop. Still, intimate and artfully rendered standards and post-bop jazz remain a core of her musical identity as on her 2023 duo album with Fred Hersch, Alive at the Village Vanguard.
Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1984, Spalding suffered from chronic pneumonia and rheumatoid juvenile arthritis, side effects of an autoimmune deficiency disorder. Subsequently, she spent much of her childhood being home-schooled. It was during these years, starting at age five, that she began playing violin after seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform on an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. She excelled at the instrument and joined the Chamber Music Society of Oregon. By the time she was 15, Spalding had been named the ensemble's concertmaster violinist. It was also at age 15 that she returned to public school. There, she joined the school band and first began playing the acoustic double bass. She immediately connected with the instrument, and at age 16 again left school to focus on music full time. She completed a GED and enrolled in classes at Portland State University, where she earned her B.A. in just three years. She also began playing locally, and studying privately with noted Portland jazz artists Ron Steen, Thara Memory, Darrell Grant, and others. Leaving Portland, she transferred to the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where she graduated in 2005 and was subsequently hired as an instructor, becoming the school's youngest faculty member at age 20.
Away from teaching, Spalding enjoyed a burgeoning performance career, leading her own trio and working with a host of artists including Joe Lovano, Patti Austin, Michel Camilo, Charlie Haden, Regina Carter, Pat Metheny, Dave Samuels, and many others. In 2006, Spalding released her solo debut, Junjo, on the Barcelona-based Ayva imprint. Two years later, she released Esperanza (on Heads Up Records), which proved a critical and commercial success. The album topped Billboard's Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, where it remained for over 70 weeks. In addition, it became the best-selling album by a new jazz artist internationally during 2008.
In August 2010, Spalding returned with Chamber Music Society, a more stylistically expansive production that found her straddling the line between contemporary modern jazz, R&B, and Brazilian traditions. It included eight originals and three covers, and featured guest vocal appearances from Milton Nascimento and Gretchen Parlato, as well as a small string section, and guitarist Ricardo Vogt. The album reached number one on Billboard's Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, and helped earn Spalding the Grammy for Best New Artist.
On the heels of her Grammy attention, Spalding issued 2012's Radio Music Society. Conceived as a companion piece to Chamber Music Society, the set featured drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and pianist Leo Genovese, with assistance from longtime collaborator saxophonist Joe Lovano and numerous guests, including drummers Jack DeJohnette and Billy Hart, guitarists Jef Lee Johnson and Lionel Loueke, hip-hop producer and DJ Q-Tip, and a slew of vocalists, Parlato and Lalah Hathaway among them. Also well-received, it peaked at number ten on the Billboard 200 and earned Spalding her second Grammy Award, this time for Best Jazz Vocal Album. The following year, she popped up on several albums by other artists, including appearing on Janelle Monáe's The Electric Lady and Lovano's Cross Culture. Similarly, in 2014, Spalding was featured on vocalist Dianne Reeves' Beautiful Life and pianist Billy Childs' Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro.
In 2016, she returned to her own work with Emily's D+Evolution, an ambitious, prog rock-infused concept album revolving around a central character named Emily, Spalding's middle name. She followed that up in 2019 with another deeply artful concept album, the Grammy-nominated Twelve Little Spells, which featured 12 songs each explicitly inspired by 12 separate parts of the body. Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an album peripherally connected to a class Spalding curated at Harvard, arrived in September 2021 and found her exploring an expansive blend of sounds. The Grammy-nominated set featured contributions by singer Ganavya Doraiswamy and singer/trombonist Corey King. A concert album, Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival, appeared in 2022 documenting the bassist's 2017 performance at the festival as part of a multi-generational super group with Wayne Shorter, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Leo Genovese. Another concert album, Alive at the Village Vanguard, arrived in January 2023 and featured her duo collaboration with pianist Fred Hersch.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/esperanza-spalding
Esperanza Spalding
Seven collaborative and five solo albums into her career at 31, Esperanza Spalding has always resolutely, intuitively, deftly expanded upon both her art and herself as a world-renowned genre- bending composer, bassist and vocalist. Spalding’s work, grounded in jazz traditions but never bound by them, has won her four Grammy awards and brought her onstage at the Oscars, the Nobel Prize Ceremony, the White House, and with Prince and Herbie Hancock. Not only does she know who she is, we know who she is.
Or, rather, we think we do. The elastic self and work of a true artist is always changing; ideas are channeled, shape-shifting becomes necessary. Emily’s D+Evolution (pronounced “d plus evolution”) is where we meet Emily—both Esperanza’s middle name and the label for the spirit- muse that flows through this multi-dimensional, theatrical performance artwork wrapped in a brilliantly urgent, vivacious record. With 6 tracks co-produced by Tony Visconti (David Bowie) and drawing, at times, from wellsprings as disparate as Cream to Shostakovich to St. Vincent, Emily’s D+Evolution is a kaleidoscopic project; raw, honest, luminous.
"Whether you want to see it as devolution and evolution, and the place where they co-exist without one diminishing the other, or...barely having the tools that you need, but having to move forward, and having to keep moving," Spalding explained to NPR in a recent interview, the album conceptually addresses the always exciting, sometimes messy process of reconciling the aspects of our selves that are in conflict. Exploding with literal and proverbial electricity, this album’s complex but immediate compositions were committed to tape partially live, and partially in front of a control room packed full of 20 or more onlookers. The trio of Spalding (fretless electric bass and vocals), Matthew Stevens (electric guitar) and Justin Tyson and Karriem Riggins (splitting drum duties) often decided to use the first take—a testament to the project’s particular energy and Spalding’s virtuosity. Many of the compositions on Emily’s D+Evolution were, after all, incubated onstage during the rigorous live performance schedule that preceded it.
Armed with the entity of Emily flowing through her, Spalding’s visionary performance of the album is an experience to behold and an integral part of the project itself. Here, Spalding is, for the first time, incorporating stage design, movement and acting into her already vivid musical storytelling practice. She’s working with stage director and playwright Will Wiegler to manifest her concepts physically now that they’ve come to life aurally.
Esperanza Spalding \ Radio Music Society, 2012 [Full Album]:
1. Radio Song 0:00
2. Cinnamon Tree 6:30
3. Crowned & Kissed 12:06
4. Land Of The Free 16:42
5. Black Gold 18:35
6. I Can't Help It (Stevie Wonder) 23:53
7. Hold On Me 28:35
8. Vague Suspicions 32:16
9. Endangered Species 38:07
10. Let Her 44:44
11. City Of Roses 49:05
12. Smile Like That 53:40
Esperanza Spalding & Radio Music Society * LIVE in Leverkusen, Germany 2012:
This is a sublime set from Esperanza Spalding and her Radio Music Society group, performing live in Leverkusen, Germany on November 6th 2012.
Esperanza Spalding: bass / vocals
Chris Turner: vocals
Jef Lee Johnson: guitar
Leo Genovese: piano / Rhodes /keys
Brian Landrus: sax
Tia Fuller: sax
Jeff Galindo: trombone
Igmar Thomas: trumpet
Corey King: trumpet
Ingrid Jensen: trumpet / vocals
Lyndon Rochelle: drums
Setlist:
1. Smile Like That
2. I Can't Help It
3. Hold on Me
4. Crowned and Kissed
5. Black Gold
6. Cinnamon Tree
7. Look No Further
Esperanza Spalding - "I Know You Know / Smile Like That" (Live in San Sebastian July 23, 2009 - 3/9)
Esperanza Spalding Performs at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, Concert
Jazz Times
Among a host of other world-renowned musicians, 25-year-old jazz sensation Esperanza Spalding will perform at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo, Norway today. Spalding is a bassist and vocalist from Portland, Ore. and considered a prodigy in the jazz world.
The two-hour event, hosted by Will Smith and wife Jada Pinkett Smith, will be shown live today at 1 p.m. on CNN. The show will begin at 8 p.m. local time in Oslo.
The concert follows a ceremony yesterday where President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. (Spalding also performed at the Nobel ceremony, following President Obama’s acceptance speech.) Obama is not scheduled to attend today’s concert.
Spalding has released two solo albums and a handful of collaborative disks, and has worked with jazz musicians such as saxophonist Joe Lovano, vibraphonist Dave Samuels and bassist Stanley Clarke.
Spalding taught herself how to play the violin when she was four years old, after watching classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma perform on the children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
"That was when I realized that I wanted to do something musical,” Spalding said on her Web site. “It was definitely the thing that hipped me to the whole idea of music as a creative pursuit.”
The young musician from a multi-lingual home played violin for the next 10 years in the Chamber Music Society of Oregon, which consists of both children and adults. At age 15 she switched to the bass because it opened up “non-classical avenues” for her to travel, such as blues, hip-hop and funk.
When she was 16, Spalding enrolled in the music program at Portland State University. At 20 she was an instructor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and set the bar for the youngest faculty member in the prestigious school’s history. Spalding was also the 2005 recipient of the Boston Jazz Society Scholarship for outstanding musicianship.
BassPlayer
May 8, 2009
After touring with her former Berklee teacher, master saxophonist Joe Lovano, and releasing the trio album Junjo with pianist Aruan Ortiz and drummer Francisco Mela (also on the Berklee faculty), the Spalding buzz turned into a roar. Esperanza, her debut for Heads Up, has the charismatic musician handily demonstrating her talents as a virtuoso instrumentalist, gifted multilingual vocalist, and potent songwriter. She plays and sings on a jazz-rooted program marked by catchy if tricky melodies, pliable grooves informed by Latin, Brazilian, African, and bebop rhythms, and multiple bursts of ripping fingerboard work and scat singing.
For Esperanza, Spalding is backed by her regular bandmates, pianist Leo Genovese and drummer Otis Brown, and joined by Cuban-born drumming sensation Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez and veteran New Orleans saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. The group blows through heady originals augmented by Milton Nascimento’s bossa-inflected “Ponta de Areia” and a version of the standard “Body and Soul” reborn in 5/4 and sung in Spanish. Her goal: sophisticated music built on jazz but influenced by other global traditions and designed for maximum emotional connection. “I’m trying to make it palatable and grooving—something that someone who isn’t schooled in jazz might ingest and appreciate. But it’s based on jazz song forms and solos, melodically and harmonically.”
Spalding, encouraged by her single mother, began playing violin at age five. A decade later she started playing bass, running blues patterns during Sunday-afternoon nightclub sessions with Portland singer/guitarist Sweet Baby James Benton. The young bassist joined a half-dozen bands, including local indie rock/pop group Noise For Pretend. Prior to attending Berklee, she spent a year studying classical music at Portland State University. In summer 2005, at age 20, she began teaching at Berklee, making her one of the college’s youngest-ever faculty members (Pat Metheny famously taught there at 19). On the horizon, she is developing two Berklee courses: one on singing and playing, and another on transcribing as a tool for learning harmony and theory. She’s also determined to write more horns and background vocals into her arrangements. “I want to expand the palette that I have for arrangements, and also home in on this counterpoint concept with the bass and voice—trying to use it in a way that’s effective, trying to integrate that into song forms and into performance.”
How do you help your students get to the next level in their playing?
By organizing how they’re going to practice. A lot of my students are overwhelmed by what they have to do in a week. I have them keep a practice journal so they can keep track of what they’ve done, and what they need to do the next time they pick up the instrument. They can see where they left off and see what they have to do next. When you do it in that kind of focused way, you learn a lot about your strengths. At home in your room, you refine what you can do.
How do you advise students on making musical connections with other players?
If you’ve done your homework, you don’t have to think much. The fundamental things are that you have rhythmic accuracy and agility on your instrument. Those are the ideals; that’s what I strive for. You’re going in to listen and converse with what’s being given to you. You have to be confident enough in your knowledge of the “topic” that you don’t need pre-prepared information. You have your own fundamentals down and, depending on the context, you’re open enough that you can literally respond in the moment. If you hear something that someone plays, you know the appropriate way to respond. I learned that playing with Joe Lovano, because he’s so free and has really complicated song forms. It’s also in knowing the song so well that you allow it to sound like itself.
Are there bass players who exemplify that approach?
All the great ones do that. John Patitucci is an amazing example; he does it beautifully, particularly with Directions In Music [with Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker, Roy Hargrove, and Brian Blade]. With people like Slam Stewart, you think of the more limited role they had then—they managed to do what they did with far fewer words. Ron Carter, Ray Brown, and Christian McBride—they keep an edge of freedom and creativity that keeps it interesting.
Pat Metheny talked about you having an “X factor.” What do you bring to the scene?
If I have a sound, I don’t know what it is yet. Maybe part of it would be an openness. I’m so new to it, it’s still sprouting. When you play, you take on the responsibility of being part of this community. What are you going to contribute, for all that you’re taking from it? That’s what drives me. I realize that it’s a responsibility. As an artist, it’s a blessing and a privilege to get up onstage, to be as creative and as good as I can be to make sure that when people come, they experience something that’s uplifting and beautiful and high quality. It hasn’t been completely refined yet.
After receiving a scholarship to Berklee, you headed a benefit concert to pay your way to Boston. How did that happen?
A friend let me use his gallery, and I paid him a rental fee out of the money I made from the concert. All my friends and their bands played for free. I put that thing on to fly myself and my bass out and have a little money in my pocket to live on. I didn’t realize at the time how hip that was!
What did you emphasize in your studies at Berklee?
I got a professional music degree, where you make your own major. For my senior project, I made a record and was promoting and leading my own band. I would take arranging, composition, vocal classes—all the things I wanted to have strong in my band—and courses in different musical styles, like world music, South American music, Brazilian music.
How did you make the connection with Joe Lovano?
I was in his nonet ensemble at Berklee. He had a trio gig, and my teacher, John Lockwood, couldn’t make it. At first it was Francisco Mela and him, just a trio with me. Then there was a quartet with a piano player, James Weidman, for a few years. Last year he started touring with US5, a quintet with two drummers. We played the Vanguard [in New York] and did a little mini-tour in California.
What kinds of things did you learn from working with him?
Joe doesn’t talk much about what he wants you to do musically. One thing I learned from him is how to learn without having to ask anything. He’d say really esoteric things, like, “Make a landscape. Just relax and follow the lines.” So I thought, How can I be an active participating observer and learn from what he’s showing me in his playing? He has this intense creative and free edge in everything he plays. He really means it—make landscapes, be creative, make up stories as you go, give him something to feel in and walk through and dance to.
Do you reach for that edge of creative freedom in your own music?
I’m getting into more structured song forms. Junjo is pure creativity; we’re just making it up as we go, and responding. That’s always a huge element. I don’t think my strong suit is knowing all the idiosyncrasies of all the periods of jazz, and I might not know all the cues. I get through it by using my ears and being creative. That’s a big part of my playing, and I’m sure it applies to everything I do. I don’t know if that was strengthened by playing with Joe or if it came from playing with Joe.
What kind of impact did your mother have on your music?
I listened to a lot of music. But the way my mom helped to shape my growth was that she would always let me play. If I wanted to play music, she’d be all for it. She was extremely supportive of whatever music was coming out of me. She went to college briefly, because she wanted to play jazz guitar. Going with her to her class, I would sit under the piano. Then I would come home and I would be playing her stuff that her teacher had been playing. I was probably about eight.
How’d you get to the bass from the violin?
It’s like waking up one day and realizing you’re in love with a co-worker. I went into this [high school] music room because I was skipping classes, and I was just messing with the bass. The first time I went in, a music teacher showed me how the blues worked, and from that day on I would always go there every day and play the bass. I was falling in love with it and didn’t even know.
My whole life, I wanted to play cello, and I sometimes thought that the violin was going to turn into the cello. But it went too far and got stuck as the bass.
What kind of impact did your hometown scene have on your playing?
There are a lot of great musicians in Portland that don’t have much to do but hang and teach and be phenomenal resources. I was good enough to pass, and people may have thought I had potential that wasn’t being cultivated. I got lots of opportunities to play beyond my level, which is the best way to get better. When people kick your butt, you feel that pain and go home and practice, and you hope that will alleviate your pain. I think that’s been the case in every band I’ve been in.
There were so many phenomenal bass players in that city at that time, I never got a taste of mediocre fledgling musicians. They were all great: Dave Friesen, Phil Baker from Pink Martini, Glen Moore from Oregon, and my personal teacher, [Oregon Symphony bassist] Ken Baldwin. I was constantly striving to be on the level of these guys. I was playing gigs with people they played with.
When did you start singing and playing at the same time?
It started with Noise For Pretend. I would play simple bass lines and sing simple melodies. Then I started getting into playing them more independently and more creatively. Often at home I’d be practicing tunes and singing the melodies to see how they all worked together. Through that process I started wanting to sing tunes live.
What is the relationship between your singing voice and your voice as a bassist?
When I’m singing, in my mind I’m always thinking of harmony. I’m always hearing different types of chords or progressions imposed on my singing, and I allude to those. On the bass I hear a lot of melodic lines, probably from listening to vocal lines. I’m always talking about counterpoint. It’s the yin and the yang; the bass tends to imply whatever the melody is. It’s about making the right kind of contrary motion.
Are there parallels between the way you phrase vocal lines and the phrasing of your bass lines?
If nothing else, people say that I’m really rhythmic when I sing. Donald [Harrison Jr., saxophonist] says that my playing is really free. Sometimes I get in trouble that way: I feel like anything I can sing, I can play on the bass, which is definitely not true.
Is there a tune on Esperanza that particularly captures where you are as a musician?
Compositionally, I think “I Adore You” is a good representation of the way I’m going now. It has a form that comes back, verse-chorus-verse, but I’m playing with form. The excitement of the song isn’t only in the solo section—there are rich arrangements and interesting forms and lots of melody, and a counterpoint interaction between the voice and bass. “She Got to You” has a lot of the same elements, but I’m trying to make it rock out. It has lyrics, too. I’m trying to get back to having fun and writing how you see and what you think and writing how you talk.
Have any particular pop songwriters influenced your songwriting approach?
I loved French music for a while—Edith Piaf and France Gall. And I had a Wurlitzer [electric piano] in my room because I wanted to be a keyboardist for a little while. Lyrically, most music I heard was in a language I didn’t understand—either Portuguese or French. Then, when I started to listen to jazz, it was [Duke Ellington lyricist] Billy Strayhorn. More important than lyrics, though, have been song form and harmonic things. I like Mario Laginha, a Portuguese composer. And Wayne Shorter. I like a lot of sus sound—suspended major 7.
Do you plan to emphasize your singing more?
I will, as I focus more on my voice. I never thought of myself as a singer. I love the people we all love: Sarah Vaughn, Betty Carter, Dakota Staton. As for being a vocalist, leading a band from the bass chair is totally different from leading from the vocal chair. I’m learning a lot from people like Richard Bona—how he plays in a band as a bassist and singer. Playing takes up so much emotional and mental energy. How do you have enough left over for singing?
What areas did you explore on Esperanza that you didn’t have a chance to with Junjo?
Junjo was like a collaborative effort; I put my name on it and toured under my name. But right away I realized that the tunes I had in mind to do at first weren’t working with those guys. With Esperanza, I’m trying to reach a broader audience with a lot of influences that have shaped my musicianship, that normally you can’t share in a jazz show. Sometimes I go to the Vanguard; it’s so hip, but there are so many people that jazz is foreign to. The objective of this music isn’t twisting and bending set rules that you need to know ahead of time.
How did you decide to sing songs in Spanish and Portuguese?
I usually sing songs in their original language. With Portuguese songs the phrasing of the melody is intrinsically linked with the language, and it’s beautiful.
Why do you have such strong feelings for Brazilian music?
They have some hip stuff happening. There’s innocence, beauty, depth, and simplicity. I think that’s what captured all the jazz musicians. There’s something in the heart.
There’s a real feeling of melancholy.
There are many versions of “Ponta de Areia,” but they all have such a deep story. That country has such an amazing and intense history—even in Rio, poverty and suffering is juxtaposed with a beautiful city.
What made you decide to do “Body and Soul” in Spanish, and in 5/4?
Dave Love, CEO of Heads Up, really wanted a song in Spanish. Off the cuff I said that we could do “Body and Soul.” That song is so beautiful; the English lyrics are simple and poetic. I said, “All right, here’s what we’re gonna do. Let’s see how we can make Spanish really sing in a swing jazz tune. And just for shits and giggles, let’s see if we can do it in five.” We’re trying to make the Spanish phrasing really sink in. I do speak Spanish; my mom is Welsh, Hispanic, and Native American, and my father is black.
What do you attribute your success to?
You never know why things happen the way they happen. I’m blessed. I think it’s the hand of fate; I don’t take full credit for it, because that would be arrogant.
Is there anyone whose career you’d like to model your own after?
I’m drawn to extremes of successful musicians. Ornette Coleman heard a sound and knew he had to be the forefather of that sound and that music. Someone like Herbie Hancock—of course his degree of musicianship is unbelievable, but he’s always been at the front of every wave of music. He’s with each new generation of musicians in terms of technology and new ways of expressing his soul. He has to adapt his style or instrumentation to be successful, and he does. Maybe a cross between Madonna and Ornette Coleman: She completely reinvents herself, but it’s all her.
The beautiful thing about someone like Miles or Ornette or Madonna is that they never have to prove anything because they just are. They know the value of the work that they do. I heard a Miles recording from ’66, a live recording of “’Round Midnight,” that was really uptempo. I asked Joe, “What the hell is this? I’ve never heard him play it this way before.” He said, “Oh, that was the year some critic told him he couldn’t play.” I really admire that.
Gear
Basses Esperanza’s main bass is a 19th-century e-size French flatback with a carved top, purchased about four years ago “at a steal” from a friend in Boston, after the neck on her previous bass kept breaking. “It’s killing,” says Esperanza. “I’d heard someone else playing it and it sounded amazing, so I assumed it would sound that good with me. It didn’t at first. With some basses, you can hear their age; they sound seasoned. I like hearing the history in a bass. It’s like the difference between hearing a 17-year-old sing a ballad and a 70-year-old singing a ballad; this one has a depth and resonance that only comes with age. Air France started harassing me [about the bass’s size], so I gave up on flying with it, although sometimes if it’s a special gig I’ll bring it. I usually just ask for a bass when I get there. If I’m in Europe, I might ask for a Czech bass.” Esperanza uses Thomastik Weichs for the E and A strings and Thomastik Spirocores for the D and G, and plays an unspecified German bow. She amplifies the bass with a Fishman Full Circle pickup.
Spalding also uses an Eminence Portable Upright Bass with a David Gage Realist pickup. “When I travel, I put it in a golf case so people won’t give me a hard time about it being a bass. I always take it with me as a carry-on.”
Finally, she plays a fretless acoustic bass guitar made by Mike Doolin in Portland. “It’s like a mariachi guitar with a flat back. He had a booth at the Montreal Jazz Fest two years ago, and he had the bass out on display. We ended up chatting. I’d never played an electric before. My music didn’t need it, so I thought, Why even bother? But when I heard the tone of this one, I wanted that color; it sounded amazing. It’s so hard to get that type of instrument to sound good, especially with a pickup. I use it more for chords, like more as a guitar, for specific colors. Last summer in Montreal, Mike let me play it at our gigs. That’s the first one he’s ever made; he’s supposed to be building me one of my own, because this is a little big for me. It’s longer than a typical fretless bass, and the body is too fat for me.”
Rig Gallien-Krueger MB150, with pickup/amp sound blended with miked acoustic sound. “I’m using more amp than mic now, just for the sake of consistency.”
Discography
As a leader:
Junjo [Ayva Music, 2006].
With Noise For Pretend (both on Hush)
Blanket Music/Noise For Pretend [2001]
Happy You Near [2002]
With Stanley Clarke
The Toys of Men* [Heads Up International, 2007].
With Nando Michelin Trio
Duende [Fresh Sound New Talent]
With M. Ward
Transfiguration of Vincent [Merge, 2003]
With Miroslav Vitous
[ECM, forthcoming]
*vocals only
www.esperanzaspalding.com
Esperanza Spalding lights up Tanglewood
Boston Globe Correspondent
August 6, 2013
Photo: HILARY SCOTT
LENOX — Esperanza Spalding contains multitudes. At her most creative, the charismatic artist doesn’t so much cross over from jazz to pop as she refracts genres into little slivers that play off each other. Once upon a time in the 20th century, her contemporary R&B effort “Radio Music Society,” released last year, would have prompted a surplus of critical angst over whether or not it’s really jazz. But today, in no small measure because the jazz world can really use a superstar of Spalding’s beaming appeal, it’s all fair play.
But she made little effort to woo the casual fan in concert at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall on Sunday night, the last stateside date supporting that 2012 album. Featuring Spalding plus an 11-piece band (complete with robust brass section), it resembled no concert I’ve recently seen, in the extent to which Spalding invited — required, really — the audience to join her in a self-contained space, where tune after tune unfurled into multi-colored essays that amounted to a delicious slow burn rather than a series of climaxes.
From the opening tune (a slowly congealing “Radio Song”), Spalding whipped her band into a sultry churn, teasing out emotional accents in a deeply textured performance. It was a series of engrossing, if insular, mood poems spiced by plenty of musical virtuosity.
Spalding alternated between basses, authoring deep-grooved riffs on the electric and dexterous, spidery solos on the acoustic. Her assured vocals rarely stole attention from the rest of the musical business, though she did cut loose on an encore duet with pianist Leo Genovese, confidently scatting her way through a song she claimed she’d bungled the day before at the Newport Jazz Festival.
In banter that sounded well practiced, Spalding frequently addressed the audience as if it were an ex-lover she was lobbing the songs at, a move with a weirdly distancing effect. But it also added context to moments like Tia Fuller’s eloquent, agitated saxophone solo in “I Can’t Help It,” bending the song’s outburst of dizzy infatuation into a frustrated lament.
Or “Smile Like That,” where a flowing instrumental dialogue between Fuller and guitarist Ricardo Vogt was crashed by Brian Landrus’s interweaving lines on tenor saxophone, suggesting the looming presence of the third member within a love triangle.
“You sure do sound good together,” Spalding quipped, entirely blurring any distinction between the song’s lyrical narrative and the chops of her excellent band. A musical argument never sounded so harmonious.
Esperanza Spalding Radio Song Official
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ACS: Geri Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington, Esperanza Spalding
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ACS (Geri Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington and Esperanza Spalding) gathers three of the most important female instrumentalists in current jazz. Formed out of their work together on Carrington’s Grammy Award winning album “The Mosaic Project,” the small ensemble stretches boundaries and revels in the art form. In response to their debut at New York’s legendary Village Vanguard, The Village Voice remarked, “the set’s expressionistic push-pull turned out to be a show of jazz fealty as disorienting as it was riveting.” The trio is elegant, experimental, and unquestionably bold.
Geri Allen is an internationally recognized composer and pianist. Since 1982 she has recorded, performed or collaborated with Ravi Coltrane, Dianne Reeves, Bill Cosby, Ron Carter, Ornette Coleman and Paul Motian. Allen is also an active jazz educator, and has taught at the New England Conservatory, The New School in New York and her alma mater, Howard University. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance as an Associate Professor of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation.
American drummer Terri Lyne Carrington has been at the top of the music industry for almost 25 years, collaborating with luminaries like Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Al Jarreau, Stan Getz, David Sanborn, Joe Sample, Cassandra Wilson, Clark Terry, Nancy Wilson, George Duke, Dianne Reeves, and numerous others. Her latest endeavor, “The Mosaic Project,” brings together some of the world’s most celebrated female instrumentalists and vocalists.
In one of the most startling achievements in jazz history, bassist Esperanza Spalding captured the world’s attention upon earning the title of Best New Artist at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. A gifted composer with a hypnotic voice, Spalding stretches the boundaries of jazz and continues her evolution with the 2012 release of Radio Music Society, which she describes as “bombastic and fun – funkier and more upbeat” than her critically acclaimed Chamber Music Society.
http://www.esperanzaspalding.com/cms/discography/
http://jazztimes.com/articles/30015-concert-review-esperanza-spalding-orpheum-theatre-boston-april-22
05/02/12
Concert Review: Esperanza Spalding, Orpheum Theatre, Boston, April 22, 2012
A triumphant homecoming for the Grammy winner and rising star
by Bill Beuttler
Esperanza Spalding, International Jazz Day, NYC, 4-12
By Jeff Tamarkin
It was also worth celebrating a jazz musician having been booked at a venue of Orpheum’s size (2700 capacity), and nearly filling the space with a diverse crowd of jazz buffs and pop fans. Four-year-old Brooklynn Masso sat watching raptly from her daddy’s lap while a couple of rows in front of her was Fred Taylor, longtime local jazz impresario, who gave Spalding’s career early support by booking her at his current club, Scullers, and at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival. Not far from Taylor sat saxophone hero George Garzone, whose path no doubt crossed Spalding’s at Berklee, and there were likely others on hand who had never seen live jazz before, let alone played it.
The show opened with the focus on an oversized boombox, its dial spinning from station to station, from one familiar radio staple to the next, eventually leading to Spalding’s 11-piece backing band of top young pros getting quick little workouts—including a snippet of scat singing by trumpeter/vocalist Leala Cyr—on an introductory instrumental. Spalding soon strolled out to join them onstage, resplendent in a tight green dress with some sort of white flower affixed to it (both in honor of Earth Day, as she noted later in the set), playing her electric bass and singing wordless vocals.
From there Spalding went on to perform nearly all of the songs from her new album, generally pausing between them to deliver short spoken introductions—the most interesting of them being to “Black Gold,” a racial pride song she was inspired to write, she said, because she recalled encouragement she’d gotten while participating in arts programs as a young black girl, and “I worried there weren’t programs like that for the boys.” (Backing vocalist Chris Turner was more prominent on “Black Gold” than elsewhere.) Visual effects were limited to the bandstand boombox and the prison bars projected behind the stage for her protest song “Land of the Free,” which called attention to the three-decades-long wrongful imprisonment of Cornelius Dupree Jr., and ended with the sound of a cell door bolting shut.
But the emphasis was very much on the music. Spalding switched back and forth from upright to electric bass throughout the set, with longtime associate Leo Genovese carrying much of the musical load, comping and soloing on piano, Rhodes electric piano and electronic keyboards. About half of the seven “Radio Music Society Horns,” like Genovese and drummer Lyndon Rochelle, date back with Spalding to her Berklee days, and all of them helped her ramp up the jazz feel to the music in concert—tight horn sections such as this one aren’t seen much in pop concerts these days, after all. Spalding’s voice, too, seemed weightier than it does on her album.
Beyond their ensemble work, the horns were granted just enough solo time to impress the audience without distracting it from Spalding and her lyrics. Guitarist Jef Lee Johnson, trumpeter Igmar Thomas, and alto saxophonist and musical director Tia Fuller all got short, quick turns on “Smile Like That,” and trombonist Corey King and tenor saxophonist Aaron Burnett did likewise on “Hold on Me.” But mostly the tunes featured one prominent instrumental solo apiece. Trombonist (and Berklee professor) Jeff Galindo blew a crowd-pleaser that meshed brilliantly with Spalding’s singing on “Crowned & Kissed.” Spalding took one herself on upright on “Vague Suspicions.” Fuller was showcased on “Cinnamon Tree,” with Thomas yelling encouragement from behind her as her fiery extended solo built toward its climax. Then Thomas followed with an even more dazzling solo of his own on “Endangered Species.” Dan Blake’s tenor sax solo on the set closer, “Radio Song,” was short, but smart and impassioned. “Radio Song” also saw Rochelle’s lone drum solo of the evening, and an only moderately successful attempt by Spalding to turn it into a sing-along—the melody was a little too complex, or the audience a little too self-conscious, for that to have worked fully as intended.
The audience may have held back its singing, but it didn’t hold back its applause. A standing ovation brought Spalding back onstage for an encore. She said that normally the band would have joined her for “City of Roses,” her tribute to her hometown of Portland, Ore. But she said that she’d spent “so many years living here in Boston,” that she figured she’d sing something about New England instead, and closed out the evening with a lovely a cappella version of a song celebrating the region (whose title, alas, she didn’t announce).
Esperanza Spalding - BEST NEW ARTIST 2011 (Interview)
Best New Artist Grammy winner, Esperanza Spalding chats with Billboard.com about her career past, present & future.Esperanza Spalding Took on Bieber, Now Takes on Jazz
The innovative bassist and winner of the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for performing arts is taking jazz to a whole new place
From This Story
In 2011, Spalding found herself onstage and on millions of television screens, collecting a Grammy Award in the Best New Artist category (and sending fans of pop post-teen sensation Justin Bieber, who lost out, into irate Twitter rants).
Her youth and beauty and progressive fashion-she accepted her Grammy in a deconstructed citron chiffon dress and a very intentional afro coaxed into a pompadour-were also an undeniable part of her appeal. Village Voice music critic Greg Tate calls Spalding the “sexiest and best thing to happen to jazz since Wynton.”
Her latest release at the time of the Grammy, Chamber Music Society, was actually her third album. She had already dazzled critics with her 2008 major-label debut, Esperanza, recorded when she was 23; it stayed on the Billboard jazz chart for 62 weeks, peaking at No. 3. In 2009, she performed twice at the White House and, at President Obama’s request, at the ceremony when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo that year. “I wanted to offer something important from our culture, from our music,” she says. “It seemed significant to play jazz there.” (She donated the dress she wore to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.)
Spalding went on to elicit praise for this year’s Radio Music Society, executed, according to Los Angeles Times music critic Chris Barton, “with disarming assurance.” The new album, wrote jazz critic Larry Blumenfeld in the Wall Street Journal, “celebrates sophisticated musical structures that ride accessible grooves.”
Her work is grounded in original compositions and performances moored artfully in jazz, but incorporating influences as varied as soul, Brazilian pop, funk, contemporary classical, blues and hip-hop. Spalding’s vocal compositions range from “Little Fly,” a William Blake poem set to music, to “Land of the Free,” based on the exoneration of Cornelius Dupree, recently released from prison after a wrongful conviction, and “Radio Song,” a paean to the serendipitous pleasure of discovering a song over the airwaves.
Legendary bass player Ron Carter, who collaborated with Miles Davis, helping him shift the music from bop to cool, says Spalding is “on the right track, she’s got a great voice and a great sound. I like the combination of her lyrics with the sound she gets from her bass. I can’t talk and play at the same time, let alone sing, so she’s a step ahead of me.” Electric bassist Meshell Ndegeocello-known for her own capacity to rap while she plays-is also impressed with the scope of Spalding’s gifts. “What makes her so phenomenal is she can speak so fluidly with her bass and her vocals.”
Spalding seems to have developed a healthy relationship with her still emerging fame. She’s often a tour headliner, as she is this evening in Chicago, where onstage she is radiant in a diaphanous ivory dress. In four-inch stilettos, she alternates between playing an electric bass and her mammoth upright bass. (Her website features a collection of dresses produced by designers concerned with creating sustainable couture.) “I feel like whenever I end up in some high-profile place like the Oscars or the Grammys, it’s a fluke,” she told me earlier that day. “I feel like I’m already there representing the underrepresented.” After answering typical red-carpet questions at those events about who she was wearing, she asked a friend to help her locate eco-friendly designers. “Since people are talking about fashion, I want them to also talk about the fact that there’s an alternative to sweatshops, synthetics and toxic dyes.”
Spalding is equally likely, however, to perform in a supporting role with someone like multi-instrumentalist Joe Lovano. She has given a great deal of thought to collaborative accomplishment. “There’s a cultural myth that’s rampant in the entertainment industry that minimizes collaboration, that overemphasizes soloists and stars and focuses on the individual,” Spalding says. “I don’t ever want to cater to that myth in our culture. Because, inevitably, there are people who aren’t written into history; you know, the teachers, all the teachers that Bird [Charlie Parker] studied with? The bands that he first started playing with? Aren’t they just as integral as his gift?”
Spalding considers collaboration to be a kind of learning lab, where musical ideas and life philosophy are explored. “When I play with Terri Lyne Carrington or Geri Allen or even Prince, yes, what we’re doing musically is one element of what we’ve come together to do, but 95 percent of it is hanging around and talking about everything from buying a house to leading a rehearsal. I learn so much every day from those kinds of interactions.” Inside the music, where instrumentalists are communicating new ideas in the moment, she insists, innovations are still part of the larger group’s exchange. “Particularly in any music that revolves around improvisation, the magic and the beauty of it is that every night something new and different happens. Because we’re inviting the question ‘What will we do tonight?’ ‘What will we do right now?’”
At the same time, Spalding acknowledges that the individual creative process also sustains her. How and when does inspiration strike? “Something new, a melodic idea, will come to you,” she says. “You wonder, ‘Wow, where’d that come from?’” That is the moment, she adds, when it’s important to “stop and take notice.”
She and her older brother grew up with their mother, a single parent, in Portland, Oregon. Spalding dropped out of her magnet school at age 16 because high school, she says, “wasn’t so much about learning, it was about social programming, which can be fun, if you aspire to reign over the social strata of the school.” Eventually she completed her GED. When she wasn’t losing herself in a book, she volunteered at environmental conservation organizations or homeless shelters. “I got that from my mom, she’s a conscientious person,” Spalding says. “She doesn’t like the talking part but the doing part, which I appreciate.” Her bass teacher at the time encouraged her to audition for a scholarship at Portland State University. Later, she moved cross-country to Berklee College of Music in Boston.
She still seems to be discovering who she is onstage as the main attraction. In the tradition of the best blues women, she’s comfortable telling stories as preludes to songs. These conversational moments likely serve to help her audience, who may or may not be well versed in jazz, connect to the music. Spalding and backup singer Chris Turner in- voke the name of slain Florida teen- ager Trayvon Martin as they introduce the song “Black Gold,” her meditation on the hopes and fears of African-American boys. Before performing “Land of the Free,” she alludes to Dupree, who was incarcerated for decades before being cleared by DNA evidence. “I’m not 30 years old yet, I can’t wrap my head around...30 years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit.” She announces that part of her merchandise sales will be donated to the Innocence Project, the organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted.
It’s the music that Spalding thinks most about. “An idea announces itself and it seems like there’s something meaningful to be found by exploring that idea,” she says of the imaginative habits that underlie her creation of original material. “It’s a process of sitting down over days, or hours, months, sometimes years, and trying to coax that idea into its full state of beingness.”
In that same way, she hopes to push jazz into the future. “I’m searching for the most beautiful version of ideas that I receive, leaving the windows open for influences outside jazz,” Spalding says. Ultimately, she adds, she aspires to “create an invitation to explore the music for a larger cross-section of listeners.”
"I Know You Know":
Esperanza Spalding's Hybrid, Intertextual,
Multilingual, Relevant Jazz Aesthetic
Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2012, Volume 11, Issue 2
https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2012/baham.htm
California State University, East Bay
Esperanza Spalding's receipt of the 2011 Grammy Award for Best New Artist was both historic and controversial not only because it marked the first time that a jazz artist was accorded that particular honor but because it signaled possibilities for new directions and a "re-contextualization" of the jazz aesthetic with an emphasis on vocal performance, radical genre hybridity, multilingualism, intertextuality, the marketability of women artists, and the return of socially relevant discourse in American music. There is no doubt that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences sought to honor Spalding's seventy weeks on the Billboard charts for her eponymous 2008 sophomore effort; the rise of her fourth album, Radio Music Society (Heads Up), to top five on the 2012 Billboard Jazz charts; her mainstream crossover appeal that resulted in an advertising spot with Banana Republic; and her 2009 performance for President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. The Academy may have also stumbled across the birth of a new jazz idiom that would reject traditional gender hierarchies and corporate-influenced genre boundaries in its embrace of an open and ever-expansive music that could once again be truly relevant to a broad diversity of audiences. The irony is that this would happen in the midst of jazz music's ever-declining share of commercial music CD sales and internet downloads as well as apocalyptic debates within the jazz world about the future survivability of the idiom. Many of the jazz cognoscenti would completely miss the moment. It turns out that while jazz critics and scholars have been waiting for the second coming of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, a powerful resurgence of discursively relevant, popular jazz has been happening at the intersection of women's performance, hybridity, multilingualism, and intertextuality. It is precisely in this location that Esperanza Spalding and the New Jazz are emerging.
Esperanza Spalding's critical and commercial accomplishments beg a reconsideration of the contemporary crisis and rumored "death" of jazz. Specifically, what role can women's jazz performance, radical genre hybridity, multilingualism, intertextuality, and discursive relevance serve in an aesthetic and commercial renaissance of the jazz aesthetic? I want to build a theory from what artist/composer and Kennedy Center Artistic Advisor Jason Moran has called "re-contextualization" and his suggestion of the infinite possibilities of jazz as an umbrella aesthetic for the radical hybridization of all musical genres and the endless intertextual relationships of music and other art forms. And, finally, I want to foreground women's vocal jazz as a fundamental axis of "re-contextualization," a significant broadening of the definition of jazz music, and communication of the social/cultural relevance of the aesthetic.
Esperanza Spalding's burgeoning career is the most logical place to begin such an inquiry because her career is profoundly linked to contemporary discursive formations of the cultural hybridization of race and gender in a nation experiencing significant demographic shifts and calling into question the assumptions of American race, class, gender, and sexual identity politics. Her career has deep roots in the history of socially relevant woman-centered vocal jazz and blues music that runs through Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Cassandra Wilson to name just a few. Spalding clearly has peers at the vanguard of "re-contextualized" jazz music including, but not limited to Terri Lyn Carrington, The Robert Glasper Experiment, Jason Moran, Madeleine Peyroux, and Gretchen Parlato. What sets Esperanza Spalding apart as an avatar of a new and re-contextualized jazz music is her ability (1) to significantly broaden the definition of jazz music and advance it as commercially viable without sacrificing its core aesthetic integrity and improvisational prerogatives; (2) to deconstruct gender bias and the concomitant second class status of vocal jazz performance within the jazz world; (3) to deconstruct performatively the conflation of aesthetics and racial authenticity and advance an understanding of the radically hybrid origins and future of the jazz aesthetic; and (4) to re-contextualize seemingly disparate musical genres to suggest new communities of musicians and listeners that affirmatively transcend traditional social/cultural boundaries.
The Death of Jazz?
A great deal of jazz commentary since the 1990s has
focused on the future survivability of jazz music in America.
Pronouncements of the "death" of jazz typically focus on quantitative
commercial sales data and subjective aesthetic evaluations. These
arguments are always linked, and critics are divided on the question of
whether jazz has become a high art inaccessible to mass audiences or
whether artists have merely ceased innovating the art form.
Terry Teachout's 2009 Wall Street Journal article "Can Jazz Be Saved?" presents an exemplary case for the commercial "death" of jazz in light of jazz's exodus from popular to high art. His commercial sales data is drawn from the 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Teachout cites the NEA's findings on declining CD sales and audiences for live performances as well as the rising median age of jazz concertgoers. Teachout asks, "What does this tell us? I suspect it means, among other things, that the average American now sees jazz as a form of high art. Nor should this come as a surprise to anyone, since most of the jazz musicians that I know feel pretty much the same way. They regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music - and just as off-putting to pop-loving listeners who have no more use for Wynton Marsalis than they do for Felix Mendelssohn."
Written in the late 1990s, Eric Nisenson's Blue: The Murder of Jazz is probably the most obvious example of critics and scholars who locate the "death" of jazz in subjective aesthetic judgments of its waning creativity and innovation: "the clearest indication that jazz is fading as an art form is the increasing diminution of genuine creative vitality" (13). Nisenson specifically makes the case for the "murder" of jazz, critiquing the notion of a contemporary renaissance based on the ascendancy of the Lincoln Center or the emergence of a large crop of new, young musicians (13). He critiques both Lincoln Center and the new generation of jazz performers as "revivalists" who are "so transfixed by jazz's magnificent past that they are as paralyzed as deer standing on a highway staring into the headlights. They seem unable to move ahead, unwilling to create music made out of the grist of their own time and place" (18-19).
Certainly much can be made of the impact of jazz "revivalists" and the impact of the jazz "classicism" of the Lincoln Center. However, neither Teachout nor Nisenson nor others of their ilk appear to recognize the ongoing commercial success of vocal jazz performance, the vocal performances of women singers in particular, and the ever-transformative ability of jazz music to incorporate and influence an infinitely diverse host of other aesthetic forms and genres including, but not limited to, folk, rock, hip-hop, electronica, pop, and world music.
The persistent failure to recognize vocal performance as simultaneously commercially and aesthetically potent is principally rooted in a fundamental de-valuation of vocal performers as something other than true musicians and innovators, a phenomena shared by jazz and the European classical world. It is secondarily linked to the explicit and implicit sexism of jazz scholarship and criticism that has long relegated the extraordinary women who have dominated vocal jazz to second-class status beneath largely male instrumental innovators. The failure to comprehend genre hybridity and ever-expanding definitions of jazz music is complicated by the presence of jazz purists and conservationists who have long failed to recognize the kind of radical hybridity and experimentation that has always been happening at the margins. It may be said that Teachout and Nisenson et al. fall prey to the very same "high art" bias - with a smattering of sexism - that they so stridently critique.
Vocal Jazz, Gender, and Commercialism
In a 2010 article for The Root.com, music critic Jozen
Cummings attempts to counter the dire prophecies of Teachout and
Nisenson, proclaiming, "Jazz is never going to die. Too many hip-hop
producers sample jazz music for that to happen." From the outset,
Cummings announces that he is speaking to hybridity, intertextuality,
and contemporary manifestations of jazz music's ability to fuse with
other musical genres.
Acknowledging jazz's ever-declining market share, Cummings places the burden of a commercial jazz revival on the shoulders of Esperanza Spalding: "But if there were any hope at all for a jazz artist to buck the downward trend, the responsibility would lie on the shoulders of Esperanza Spalding - the brilliant, exciting bassist-vocalist whose eponymous debut album sold a respectable 72,000 copies when it was released in May 2008, according to Nielsen Soundscan, making it the 17th best-selling jazz album of the year. No small feat, when one considers the jazz genre's seemingly endless discography of legends like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. (She also sold 42,000 digital singles that same year)."
Cummings suggestive conflation of women's vocal performance and genre hybridity is well-supported by recent commercial music sales data. Among the top ten jazz albums on the Billboard Charts during the spring of 2012, five were produced by vocalists Esperanza Spalding, Tony Bennett, Paul McCartney, Frank Sinatra, and Kat Edmonson. Significantly, two vocalists on the jazz charts were women and by 2 June 2012, vocalist Melody Gardot's The Absence EP (Verve) debuted at the eighth spot on the jazz album chart. It should also be noted that from spring of 2011 to January 2012, Brazilian vocalist Gretchen Parlato's The Lost and Found (ObliqSound) spent some seventy-two weeks on the Billboard Charts, topping at number four. Three of the top ten jazz albums were produced by instrumentalists who integrated vocal performances within their compositions including Chris Botti's Impressions (Columbia), the Robert Glasper Experiment's Black Radio (Blue Note), and Arturo Sandoval's Dear Diz (Concord). Interestingly, two of the Billboard top ten jazz albums integrated hip-hop aesthetics: Esperanza Spalding and the Robert Glasper Experiment. Robert Glasper's first full-length album featured a host of vocal performers including women vocalists Erykah Badu, Lalah Hathaway, Ledisi, Chrisette Michele, and Meshell Ndegeocello.
What recent Billboard charts appear to suggest is the responsiveness of modern audiences to jazz music that integrates the structures (i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm) and texts (i.e. lyrics) of other musical art forms and genres. Additionally, jazz audiences appear to prefer the integration of non-jazz structures and texts when presented by women performers and, in many cases, women vocalists. Esperanza Spalding's use of Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish-speaking vocalists featured by Arturo Sandoval, Maria Farantouri's Greek and Byzantine folk songs, or the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics sung by Gretchen Parlato further suggest that jazz audiences may not be averse to the integration of multilingualism and that they may well be able to tolerate the confluence of all of these factors in one composition.
Perhaps in light of the Billboard success of vocal performance and woman-centered performance, Esperanza Spalding is beginning to appear on the critics and audience rankings for the establishment publications Jazz Journal, DownBeat, and JazzTimes. In 2010, Chamber Music Society (Heads Up) was ranked at the thirty-fourth position on the JazzTimes Top 40 list. The DownBeat 2011 Reader's Poll honored Spalding as best new jazz artist, mirroring the Grammy Awards; however, the DownBeat Critic's Poll only recognized Spalding as a Rising Star on electric bass. Spalding did not appear on the 2011 Jazz Journal new issues critics list, but she was the cover story for their January 2011 edition, an accomplishment that is certainly extraordinary in light of Jazz Journal's overwhelming preference for male artists as cover stories.
JazzTimes and DownBeat readers and critics are also beginning to come around on the broader categories of vocal performance, women's vocal performance, multilingualism, and contemporary genre hybridity. On the 2011 JazzTimes Top 40 new releases, the Charles Lloyd/Maria Farantouri Athens Concert (ECM) English-Greek collaboration appears at number six; Terri Lynn Carrington's Mosaic Project (Concord) featuring all-women jazz performers and vocalists Esperanza Spalding, Dianne Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Sheila E., Nona Hendryx, Cassandra Wilson, and Geri Allen appears at number fourteen; Gretchen Parlato's The Lost and Found (ObliqSound) appears at sixteen; Kurt Elling's The Gate (Concord) is nineteen; Elling's collaboration with Theo Bleckmann and the Claudia Quintet on What Is Beautiful (Cuneiform) is ranked twenty-one. Jazz Journal did recognize Kurt Elling's recording on its 2011 critics list of new issues.
The overall relatively "lower" rankings and infrequent regard for vocal performance, women's vocal performance, and genre hybridity are indicative of the role that JazzTimes, Jazz Journal, and DownBeat have played as lagging indicators of the critical importance of these movements for the future survivability of jazz music. The critics who write for these establishment publications have not been at the vanguard predicting the role of such artists as Spalding. However, the mere recognition of such magical recordings as the Charles Lloyd/Maria Farantouri collaboration, in which jazz music is integrated with Byzantine sacred and folk music as well as the sounds of the lyra (pear-shaped fiddle) and the laouto (Eastern lute), is indicative of an awakening amongst the establishment to the infinite possibilities of extending the very definition of the genre.
In fact, Esperanza Spalding's particular achievement as an innovator and avatar of a new jazz has been held in dubious regard by the jazz establishment and reflects the notion that much of the jazz establishment is in a transitional moment. In a JazzTimes article in May 2012, Giovanni Russonello wrestles with the perceived "contradiction" of audience expectations of Spalding as jazz "savior" and her personal, artistic interest in hybridity and broader avenues of musical expression: "Slowly but surely, the jazz world is realizing that she may have already moved past its boundaries. At the very least, she is ignoring them."
Russonello specifically cites Spalding's 2010 release Chamber Music Society (Heads Up) as a turning point, confusing her attempts at expanding the very definition of jazz with rejection of the jazz idiom: "On Chamber, Spalding's pastiche was suddenly inundated with new colors, mostly muted grays and browns thrown onto a canvas of classical undertones. No longer did Spalding the jazz musician seem interested in expanding genre; she was trying to ignore it." Dramatically likening Spalding to a wandering lover, Russonello further mischaracterizes Spalding's expansion of the genre as rejection: "All of this ought to be telling jazz's diehards something - what they already knew but didn't really want to admit. It's a little like silently realizing that, sure, your girlfriend still loves you, but she's been across the room dancing with somebody else all night. The reason Spalding took home the Best New Artist Grammy is the same reason why she can't possibly be what most purists want her to: She won it because she has novelty - a crucial figure in the pop music equation - and that much-maligned asset known as crossover appeal. That's a term that really means jazz accounts for, at best, a slim majority of an artist's influences."
However, much to his credit, Russonello acknowledges that Spalding's work promises a bright future for jazz, in spite of the dubious regard in which she is held by the establishment: "With the arrival of her two most recent albums, 2010's Chamber Music Society and the newly released Radio Music Society, both on Heads Up, it's become clear that trying to understand Esperanza Spalding as 'this' type of musician who makes 'that' type of music is going to be futile. We ought to approach her from the other direction: Every bit of work she offers is just another light she's turned on for us, illuminating one more room where she's been laying her plans and charting her way."
Re-Contextualization, Hybridity, and Broadening the
Definition of Jazz
On 30 April 2012, Jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran -
the recently installed Artistic Advisor for the Kennedy Center - spoke
at length with NPR's Neil Conant about the future survivability and
continued relevance of jazz music. As stated above, Moran, who succeeds
Billy Taylor as only the second Artistic Advisor at the Kennedy Center,
posited a theory of "re-contextualization" in which jazz music would
present itself differently in order to survive. His argument is
suggestive of a sophisticated interplay of musical "texts," "forms," and
the manipulation of "language" and "dialect." For example, Moran spoke
eloquently of his own performative "re-contextualization" of Afrika
Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" (hip hop form, text, and "language") and his
collaboration with Meshell Ndegeocello to transform the music of Fats
Waller into contemporary dance music (the text of stride piano meets the
texts of soul, funk, rock, and dance).
I want to extrapolate from Moran's brief comments and build a theory of "re-contextualization" that can be used to measure the significance of Esperanza Spalding's work and many of the new voices responsible for a re-birth of contemporary jazz. For me, "re-contextualization" refers to radical genre hybridity, intertextuality, multilingualism, and a return to the connection between music and socially relevant discourse. I use the spirit of Roland Barthes post-structuralist interpretation of "intertextuality" to explain the interpretation of meaning of a particular text (i.e. lyrics) by a listener in relation to other text. "Radical hybridity" refers to meaningful and evocative juxtapositions of musical genres and speaks to the compositional form in which lyrical texts are presented. In many cases, meaning may be rendered through an intertextual interpretation of the juxtaposition of lyrical texts against musical forms or even against language, where "genre" or "language" and "dialect" become another "text." I have chosen to use the term "radical" in this context to emphasize multiple and unexpected genre juxtapositions that fall outside of the norm of expected and now "traditional" pairings (e.g. Brazilian jazz, jazz-rock fusion, etc.). My attention to "discursive relevance" is a call to music that matters and either initiates or substantiates real-world discursive practices.
What Moran is specifically referring to is the need for a significant broadening of the definition of jazz. He is suggesting that in fact jazz music is such a fundamental aspect of music generally speaking - American and global music - that jazz is everything and can encompass anything. His own experimentation with hip-hop and soul vocal performance speaks to this "re-contextualization" of the music. Indeed, Esperanza Spalding clearly concurs with this view of the jazz aesthetic. In an interview on Riz Khan's One on One, she says: "These days it seems that jazz is the word that is open enough that it can encompass almost what anybody does."
Jozen Cummings echoes Jason Moran's notions of hybridity and "re-contextualization," suggesting that Spalding's ability to remain aesthetically as well as commercially relevant to diverse audiences of listeners rests on her ability to play with a host of different musical genres. Cummings writes: "Spalding sees her surging popularity differently. Just because her audience is probably more familiar with Motown than Monk doesn't mean she will cater to their ears. As an example, she points out 'I Adore You,' a song from her album Esperanza. 'I remember having discussions, and [some would say,] "It's too much scatting, it's too jazzy." And now all the time, people say it's their little kids' favorite song,' Spalding says. 'And there are no words. Parts of it are complex, but aspects of it speak to their kids, too.' And for Spalding, therein lies the challenge: to speak to audiences of all ages through a variety of genres. 'Obviously, the audience that shows up to [Austria's] Vienna Opera House is going to be different than the audience that shows up to [New York's] Joe's Pub,' says Spalding, who has played at both venues. 'I guess I'm really blessed that it's very diverse, and it will be a blessing as long as I stay relevant.'"
There is no better example of intertextuality and radically hybrid genre juxtaposition than Spalding's third CD release Chamber Music Society (Heads Up). Ostensibly a nod to the early years of her classical training and the foundations of classical music as a more communal style of acoustic playing without horns and with limited orchestration, Chamber Music Society incorporates an adroit hybridization of jazz, soul, funk, world music, and western classical concert music. Her composition, "Little Fly," is indicative of the kind of radical time-space intertextuality that Spalding embraces. The intertextuality of "Little Fly" integrates the fundamental existential questions posed by the eighteenth century poetry of William Blake within the musical context of soulful vocals; a European chamber music composition for acoustic bass, cello, violin, and viola; and a brief improvised jazz bass solo outro. Spalding wraps a multi-textured lyrical meditation on time and the balance between life and death within a hybrid musical composition that itself draws attention to the meditation on time and space. Musically, she blends contemporary NuSoul lyricism with a pre-Baroque medieval musical form and jazz improvisational approaches that have defined the American experience since the dawn of the twentieth century. Here, Blake's meditation on life meets Spalding's journey through musical time and genre.
The specific musical pairing of chamber music and jazz improvisation suggests significant linkages between the contrapuntal prerogatives of the former and the polytonal and poly-rhythmic group improvisations of the New Orleans and free jazz, all of which are strongly suggestive of Spalding's emphasis on community. Taken as a whole, Spalding's hybridity and intertextuality deftly integrates community within Blake's poetic rendering of the delicate balance between life and death, suggesting that community operates as a fulcrum in that delicate balance and perhaps even the broader community between human and animal life/nature offered by Blake. Furthermore, her use of hybridity and intertextuality challenges both time and space, suggesting not only possibilities for present community formation but also the blending and re-contextualization of historical traditions.
Spalding has spoken about chamber music as a form most suitable for emphasizing community, underscoring the implications of her music in formal interview settings and providing further discursive cues for listeners. In an EPK for the release of Chamber Music Society, Spalding comments, "Chamber music is music for people. It is often described as music for friends." Here, Spalding insists again that the music is about community and implies that intertextuality and the hybrid interplay of genres potentially draws together new forms of community, bringing musicians who may heretofore have never considered performing together an opportunity to do so in a meaningful musical conversation across time and space.
Socially Relevant Discourse
Esperanza Spalding's formal aesthetic hybridity,
multilingualism, and intertextuality encompasses profound social
meaning. Her brand of "re-contextualized" jazz conveys a performative
deconstruction of aesthetic racial authenticity rooted in her own
multiethnic heritage that resonates with contemporary post-racialist
aspirations. Her radical hybridity, intertextuality, and multilingualism
offer a sophisticated and playful pastiche of time and place that
challenges aesthetic racial ownership and monolithic constructions of
both race and culture. In many respects, Spalding's compositional
interplay of diverse musical traditions deconstructs difference as
problematic and suggests a kind of harmonious and democratic racial
polyphony. This focus on harmonious polyphony implies Spalding's own
prerogative for creating community through a "re-contextualized" jazz
aesthetic. Spalding simultaneously de-centers musical genres from
specific racial or national affiliation and re-locates them within
expressions of broader communities of sound.
In her interview with Riz Khan's One on One, Spalding responds to a question about her own African-American, Latino, Welsh, and American Indian ancestry as well as her ability to sing in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Her characterization of her own ancestry and youthful cultural experiences informs us of her very genuine and perhaps "natural" appreciation of cultural hybridity and "re-contextualizatio." She states: "Those cultures have influenced me in this way. Growing up I didn't identify with any of those specifically. So I think the way that that has influenced my art is really in kind of being cultural identity neutral, which is good and bad. It's helpful, as we all know, to be a part of a defined identity, defined way of expressing yourself, interacting with your ancestors and with your story, how to behave in the culture. Without a very strong foundation you end up looking for examples from other cultures of how to act, how to speak, how to sing, how to play, everything. And that can be good and bad. I think in the music it's really good."
Spalding's "Black Gold" duet with Algebra Blessett - a contemporary R&B singer with gospel roots - from the 2011 release Radio Music Society (Heads
Up) - is illustrative of the ways in which Spalding infuses hybrid
aesthetic juxtapositions and intertextuality with social meaning and
relevance. Spalding's composition is an affirmative and upbeat fusion of
jazz, NuSoul, and gospel music and serves as an affirmation and
encouragement to young black men, insisting on the critical importance
of an Afrocentric reading of history:
Hold your head as high as you can
High enough to see who you are, little man
Life sometimes is cold and cruel
Baby no one else will tell you so remember that
You are Black Gold, Black Gold
You are Black Gold
Now maybe no one else has ever told you so
But you're golden, baby
Black Gold with a diamond soul
Think of all the strength you have in you
From the blood you carry within you
Ancient men, powerful men
Builders of civilization
They'll be folks hell-bent on putting you down
Don't get burned
'Cause not necessarily everyone will know your worth
The official video for "Black Gold" features an African-American father picking up his two sons from elementary school and, after learning the substance of their history lessons, informing them about the greatness of African civilization. At home, the father shows his sons his African history scrapbook, entitled "Black Gold," and highlights the achievements of such diverse figures as Sundiata, Miriam Makeba, Salif Keita, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Fela Kuti. The video concludes with the father taking his sons to hear Spalding and Blessett as they sing to these two young men from an urban block party stage. The video has an urban community feeling of racial, gender, sexual identity, and age diversity as people gather around the stage wearing t-shirts bearing the faces of many of the different figures in African history in the father's "Black Gold" history book. Against the video backdrop of an urban and largely African-American community block party performance, Spalding's lyrics suggest that a re-contextualized black nationalism and Afrocentricity can be used as a contemporary racial affirmation of African-American youth that may serve as a foundation for building healthy communities. The message is clear: self-love through historical awareness is the first step toward enfranchisement in a democratic society.
Although "Black Gold" reasserts discourses of black nationalism and Afrocentricity of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the video importantly fails to visually or aurally represent the specific historical contexts that gave birth to these ideas, and, in so doing, it purposely decontextualizes and inverts these ideas and re-presents them for a new and broadly inclusive politics of self-love. The video's particular presentation of many of the core figures of Afrocentric discourse and its assertion of the popular Afrocentric phrase "Africa was inhabited by Kings and Queens" by the father is unmistakable, but its re-presentation of these figures in the father's well-worn scrapbook - a classic example of how relationships between texts affect interpretation and meaning - re-locates them in an undefined future and re-contextualizes them for the contemporary audience of two school age African-American boys in an urban American environment; these images are now used to inform these young men that they are beautiful. That the community they participate in appears inviting further suggests that black enfranchisement through a re-contextualized black nationalism is fundamental to broader issues of inclusive coalition building and racial harmony.
Spalding's "Black Gold" composition not only broadens the definition of jazz music but it also engages socially relevant discursive practices. She not only "re-contextualizes" the music, but the message as well. Spalding's lyrical manipulation of Afrocentrism alludes to specific expressions of the burgeoning "golden years" of hip-hop in a pre-gangster rap era marked by such artists as Afrika Bambaataa, KRS-One, and, later, A Tribe Called Quest, and Public Enemy. Spalding draws the listener's attention to hip-hop's long lost ability to engage affirmative messaging and its initial and profound connection to community. She also deconstructs the hyper-masculinity of hip-hop and prescriptively suggests the significant role of women in the development and positive encouragement of young black men. Most importantly, Spalding's embrace of genre hybridity challenges the conflation of racial authenticity and aesthetics in hip-hop, suggesting that music in general and hip-hop in particular have always been the product of racial encounters and diaspora and cannot legitimately support claims to racial authenticity.
Nowhere was the discursive relevance of Esperanza
Spalding's music put to a greater test than her performance at the Nobel
Peace Prize Award Dinner for President Barack Obama. Spalding performed
"Espera" from her eponymous sophomore album. In a relatively
straightforward jazz trio (piano, bass, drums) and with simply a tease
of multilingualism in the title, Spalding unloaded a deeply moving plea
for peace, consistent with her aesthetic and social/cultural message of
polyphony before the newly installed American President:
People I almost gave up holding on
Watching us give into our fears
I almost believe
Almost believe
All the world is helpless sorrow
No hope for a bright tomorrow
But I'm not sure enough
To give it up...no
Now as I learn how I must work for change
I nearly cave in from the weight
I almost believe
Almost believe
All the sorrows will consume me
'Til peace among men I never can see
But I'm not sure enough to give it up
I'll keep faith
Like so many souls who won't be drowned
By evil in the world
I have faith in mankind
That we can guide our choices towards a healthy world
In time
To ease our bind
For only hard work through time
Can change men's minds,
I know if we make some small changes now
We'll heal ourselves, and that's true power
I don't expect to ever taste the fruit
My life devoted could bring forth
I almost believe
Well I do believe
The road to peace is endless
To journey with open eyes is how we'll end this
Of this I'm sure enough
I WON'T GIVE UP
I'M SURE ENOUGH
AND I WON'T GIVE UP
I'M SURE ENOUGH
AND I WON'T GIVE UP
Spalding's performance of "Espera" did far more than
merely reflect the hopeful tenor of the Nobel proceedings. Her lyrical
presentation provided a contrasting text to Obama's acceptance speech
and challenged the fundamental rationale for Obama's receipt of the
award. Spalding's "Espera" functioned as a critical intertextual mirror
in which Obama could evaluate the appropriateness and the burden of the
award. Obama was specifically cited by the Norwegian Nobel Committee
"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and
cooperation between peoples," his promotion of nuclear
nonproliferation, and for presumably creating a "new climate" in
international relations by extending dialogue and diplomacy to the
Muslim world (Erlanger and Stolberg). But there were fundamental
contradictions surrounding Obama's receipt of the award including his
stated intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan, a war that he had
always claimed was the "correct war," and his exposition of the concept
of a "just war" in his Nobel acceptance speech.
Obama walked a rhetorical tightrope in his acceptance speech, weighing peace as the glorious yet impossible ideal of the likes of Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. against the political and, in his view, very permanent realities of conflict and the existence of evil in the world. Cognizant of his role as a politician, he contrasted himself with the storied idealists of peace: "I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago - 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.' As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak - nothing passive - nothing naïve - in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."
Obama outlined a pragmatic doctrine for the use of force and explicitly dismissed the pacifist idealism. He evoked moral and strategic imperatives, asserted America's commitment to global security and nuclear disarmament, prioritized human rights, and suggested a path to honor through adherence to these principles and defined rules of engagement. But his measured justification of war embraced contradiction and patronized Gandhi and King as naïve in spite of his stated regard for their lives and work. In response to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s absolutist and indeed radical notion that injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere, Obama retorted, "We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravation, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace."
In her position as an artist, Esperanza Spalding's performance of "Espera" reasserted pacifist idealism and the critical importance of the human striving for the ideal. Spalding's use of the phrase - "Now as I learn how I must work for change" - signified Obama's central campaign theme and signaled her interpretive intentions. Key phrases such as "real power"; her dubious evaluation in the phrase "I'm not sure enough"; her lyrical recognition that change rests not in the power of one leader but in the activities of many in the phrase "I have faith in mankind"; and her powerful declaration that ends the song "I won't give up" - all combine to form an evocative assessment and plea to the Obama presidency to reassess his blanket rejection of pacifist ideals. In context, it was an incredibly courageous counter-narrative to Obama's measured political pragmatism. Spalding further demonstrated the real substance of democratic free speech - often confused with the unfettered ability to spew meaningless vitriol - as an exercise in speaking truth to power.
Certainly, there are vastly different responsibilities in
politics and art, but Spalding's willingness to engage the political
reminds us how American art and music have served as important
social/cultural initiators and how critical the production of artistic
counter-narratives are for the healthy functioning of a pluralistic
democratic society. Through the creation of a new "re-contextualized"
jazz music that recaptures the discursive relevance and social/cultural
viability of American art, Spalding firmly locates herself within the
history and evolution of jazz music, a once profoundly relevant musical
form born of the gumbo of hybridity, intertextuality, and
multilingualism in turn of the century New Orleans, Louisiana.
Conclusions
The popularity of jazz music has always rested on its
discursive relevance to community and its ability to either suggest or
form new communities of listeners. Each evolutionary shift in the
musical form of jazz produced shifts in discursive practices, whether
from swing to bop or from bop to free jazz. And each of these
transitions had a clear, definable and singular discourse that gave
meaning to the individual notes played or sung by improvising musicians.
New Orleans jazz reflected the broad diversity of the region, the complicated racial hierarchies of French Catholic society, and the newfound freedom of African Americans who created this art form. Jazz defined the new social ethos, reflected changing gender dynamics and social mores of the Roaring Twenties, and emerged in the midst of significant technological advancements in communications including the development of the radio and phonograph (Nisenson 58). That jazz emerged in the midst of significant technological developments in communication cemented its modernity. The great swing bands of the 1930s and '40s spoke a light and danceable language of escape for a generation suffering under the Great Depression and seeking sources of aesthetic energy to fight World War II. The frenetic pace of post-WWII bebop and the contrasting relaxed feel of cool jazz simultaneously spoke to a Cold War generation living under the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, Communist witch hunts and the broad expansion of American capitalism (Nisenson 126). The Afrocentric allusions and return to the cross-rhythms, the call and response of free jazz spoke to the northern and western urban manifestations of the Civil Rights Movement and were unmistakably political.
There are many specific compositional examples of linkages between the formal aesthetic evolution of jazz music and the evolution of jazz's meaningful engagement and interaction with relevant social discourse. As David Evans notes, Bessie Smith's socially relevant 1927 recording "Back-Water Blues" about the 1926 Cumberland River Flood in Nashville, Tennessee, reminds us of the intimate linkages to community that the blues, the ancestral precursor of jazz, has always had. Consider Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," first performed in 1939 at the Café Society Club in New York City or Charles Mingus's "Fables of Faubus" on the 1959 release Mingus Ah Um (Sony), an explicitly political piece that served as a response to Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 dispatched the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African-American teenagers. Consider "Hiroshima: Rising From the Abyss" by Toshiko Akiyoshi, a stunning musical portrait of the chaos and horror of war and the lessons one must learn in its aftermath.
The improvisational engine of jazz music assures its continued presence in American and global cultures. Improvisation is a fundamental discourse, particularly germane to immigrant and diasporic experiences and certainly central to the experience of enslavement of the African-American creators and innovators of jazz music. However, contemporary times require another substantive link between the jazz aesthetic and relevant public discourse that might be inclusive of the modern day realities of the welfare state, poverty, chronic unemployment, endless war, the crisis of racialism and the promise of post-racialism, the crisis of the nation-state and the advent of globalism, etc.
The problem with a lot of jazz today is that, absent any living discourse outside of the discourse of nostalgia, the individual notes played by improvising musicians no longer carry the same broad cultural meanings that they bore when jazz was America's popular music. Hence, the effective "death" of jazz music as a popular cultural art form. Much of jazz no longer informs us on broader, national and international cultural levels, no longer provides moments of euphoria and escape in the midst of a challenging economy or war-torn years, no longer speaks the language of the speakeasy and the flapper, no longer resonates the onomatopoeia of the railroads carrying migrants north and westward from the Mississippi Delta, no longer speaks to the complicated multiculturalism and brazen lawlessness of New Orleans, no longer speaks to the Cold War and the nuclear age, no longer speaks to our longing for freedom. Further, many jazz musicians no longer produce compositions like "Alabama" or "Fables of Faubus." Jazz hasn't necessarily "died" but in order for the music to connect with people on a larger, national, international, popular discursive level, jazz music must incorporate an even broader and increasingly more diverse range of meanings around a progressive and determined movement of "re-contextualization."
Hybridity, intertextuality, multilingualism are, in my view, the relevant discourses of the new millenium in this an age of globalization and rapid technological advancements in global communication, the emergence of China and India as world economic powers, the decline of the European economy, the re-appraisal of sexual identity difference and gender, transnationalism, significant demographic shifts, and the crisis of a diminishing European-American majority. We are nearing the twilight of racial, gender, and sexual identity bias. It is the age of the Occupy movement and the critique of American colonialism and corporatism. We need a jazz music that speaks to the chaos of our times and assists us as listeners with the process of interpreting meaning and sifting through the noise.
In my view, Esperanza Spalding is speaking to contemporary discursive formations of cultural hybridity, intertextuality, and multilingualism that are broadly inclusive of many of these tensions. Her work suggests that jazz improvisation is a fundamental discursive practice that undergirds and incorporates endless other musical forms, extra-musical texts, and languages. The new aesthetic of Spalding's re-contextualized jazz communicates an important and timely social message about cultural hybridity, suggesting possibilities for alternative community formation and creative new cultural/social alliances in a world of ever-changing alliances, particularly as the Enlightenment legacy of race, gender, and sexual identity wane. Furthermore, Spalding's work is suggestive of the vanguard leadership of women in building a new future. The question of the survivability of jazz rests in large measure on the ability of musicians like Esperanza Spalding to continue to draw an ever-expanding circle around this thing called "jazz," create new and previously unheard of communities of sound, and connect their art to that which is socially and culturally relevant.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill & Wang Publishers, 1978. 142- 148.
Cummings, Jozen. “The Root Interview: Esperanza Spalding on Taking a Big Risk.” The Root 30 August 2010: http://www.theroot.com/views/root-interview-esperanza-spalding-staying-relevant
Erlanger, Steven and Sheryl Gay Stolberg “Surprise Nobel for Obama Stirs Praise and Doubts” New York Times 8 October 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/10nobel.html?_r=2&
Evans, David. “Bessie Smith’s ‘Back-Water Blues’: The Story Behind the Song.” Popular Music 26.1 (2006): 97-115.
Nisenson, Eric. Blue: The Murder of Jazz. Cambridge: MA: Da Capo Press, 2000.
Obama, Barack. "Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize." The White House Website 10 December 2009: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize
Russonello, Giovanni. "Esperanza Spalding: Star Time."JazzTimes 7 May 2012:
http://jazztimes.com/articles/29851-esperanza-spalding-star-time
Spalding, Esperanza. EPK. Chamber Music Society. Montuno Artists. Uploaded 22 July 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKcTuqO8FSk
---. Interview. Riz Khan's One on One. Al Jazeera English. Uploaded 18 September 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duiDsimsJLk&feature=related
Teachout, Terry. “Can Jazz Be Saved?” Wall Street Journal 9 August 2009: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204619004574320303103850572.html
Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding Duet
Tavis Smiley Program on PBS: May 27, 2015
"Footprints" by Wayne Shorter):
Esperanza Spalding Is Always Evolving | VERSED: ASCAP Podcast - EP 31
The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music's Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It's the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space.
Suraya Mohamed | January 7, 2022 Enter into esperanza spalding's safe space for healing through music and song with a Tiny Desk (home) concert of selections from her Songwrights Apothecary Lab, (S.A.L.) project.
A constant iteration of evolutionary ideas, her songwriting workshop is both a bold examination of human existence and resilience and a guided research collaboration with a collective of musicians and researchers in the practices of neuroscience, psychology and music therapy. "All Formwelas (songs) from the S.A.L. are created through our research, divination, intuition, musicianship, taste, inspiration, and collaborative effort to design songs that enhance a specific salutary affect," spalding writes on her project site, along with brief descriptions for each of the three Formwelas performed here. "Formwela 3":"a re-membering with the sun's vast and perpetual blessing as evidenced by one's own aliveness and capacity for creating within self and community an un-corruptible home-planet" "Formwela 4": "the articulation of needs streaming oxygenation through your ancestral vessel/vein of infinite life" "Formwela 8": "a sound at ease, with no urge to move from that comfort place" spalding's performance here is outstanding, and her top notch band, Loving presences (aka singers) and the Magical dance presence (aka dancer) add a dimension of creativity that amplifies the music's message and nourishes the spirit. Green-screened walls explode to reveal a constellation of imagery that complements the flow of this seductive music. Be sure to watch until the end.
SET LIST "Formwela 3" "Formwela 4" "Formwela 8" "Formwela 3"
MUSICIANS: esperanza spalding: vocals, bass Vuyo (Vuyolwethu) Sotashe: vocals Safa Ishmel-Muhammad: vocals Corey King: vocals, guitar Matthew Stevens: guitar Leo Genovese: piano, Farfisa, Rhodes Aaron Burnett: saxophone Francisco Mela: drums
LOVING PRESENCES Donna Hope: vocals Jeff Tang: vocals Lileana Blain Cruz: vocals Mariza Scotch: vocals Lisa Lamothe: vocals Diery Prudent: vocals Adobuere Ebiama: vocals Shamel Pitts: dancer
CREDITS Director: Adrien GYSTERE Peskine Producer: esperanza spalding Recorded and mixed by Fernando Lodeiro Concept, Direction, Creative Direction, Sets, Editing, Foley, Choreography: Adrien GYSTERE Peskine Production: Héloïse Darcq Additional Production, Set Design: Anthony Peskine Additional cameras: Jessica Cochran, Daniel Santos, Meg Stacker Assistant Sound Engineer: Quinn McCarthy Sudan Pyramids Footage: Alexis Peskine Wardrobe: JOJO ABOT Recorded at The Creamery Studio TINY DESK TEAM Producer: Suraya Mohamed Video Producer: Kara Frame Audio Mastering: Andy Huether
Esperanza Spalding - Exposure
February 2, 2022
[2017]
EXPOSURE [00:00:00] Swimming toward the black dot [00:04:52] Public trance it [00:09:27] Heaven in pennies (with Robert Glasper) [00:15:46] Colonial fire [00:19:45] Coming to life (with Lalah Hathaway) [00:23:56] Geriment [00:26:19] I am telling you [00:30:58] The ways you got the love (with Andrew Bird) [00:36:17] I do [00:39:04] Double jointed canyon UNDEVELOPED (Pre-Exposure Practise) [00:43:19] Helluva [00:46:33] Tangerine [00:50:28] Word jungle [00:54:28] Chelsea mercy [00:59:00] Work of art [01:01:09] Winning machines [01:06:47] Trouble [01:10:34] 4th grade [01:15:51] Whisper [01:17:56] Fittest
Backstage with Esperanza Spalding at the White House
December 29, 2015
The President and First Lady host an all-star music tribute celebrating the 50th anniversary of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act that was signed into law by President Johnson in 1965. Before taking the stage with the likes of Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Smokey Robinson, Trombone Shorty, James Taylor and more, Esperanza Spalding gave a special backstage interview and preview of her performance. Check out the full "In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of American Creativity" on PBS.
Esperanza Spalding - "Endangered Species" (by Wayne Shorter)
Esperanza Spalding - "Jazz Ain't Nothin But Soul"
