André Leon Talley's Day With Esperanza Spalding

Wednesday May 18, 2011

From Vogue

ALT’s Day with Esperanza Spalding
By: André Leon Talley

“This level of creativity and craftsmanship—it has to be a very lonely life. What happened?” asked Esperanza Spalding. The Best New Artist Grammy winner had taken the subway on a recent Monday to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view “Savage Beauty,” the exceptional show honoring and showcasing the legacy of Alexander McQueen, who died at the age of 40 last year. Spalding had been scheduled to hit the Met Gala red carpet the previous week, but had a commitment she couldn’t break (opening for Prince in Inglewood, California). Wearing a fitted mudcloth-print coat made by a Malian tailor in Cape Town, she was happy to walk the empty galleries of the museum (usually closed on Mondays) for a special visit. “It’s wonderful, wonderful,” she said. Spalding is a captivating presence, a 26-year-old woman short on extraneous words but long on impeccable manners. When she received the exhibition catalog, she tore off the plastic wrap and began reviewing the pieces she admired—the balsa-wood winged skirt, the armadillo boots, the exquisite tailoring. McQueen would have loved the one thing she said, over and over again, about his fierce creativity: “My eyes were shipwrecked.”

At age five, the jazz performer saw Yo-Yo Ma on television and asked her mother to buy her a violin. “I recently met him at the Kennedy Center and told him he is responsible for opening my world. When I was growing up, we couldn’t afford expensive lessons, so I took advantage of a lot of free music lessons,” she told me. The Portland, Oregon native later earned a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston; she starts recording her fourth album, Radio Music Society, this summer.

From the Met, we drove down to Sikkema Jenkins & Co., to take in Kara Walker’s new show. Also usually closed on Mondays, the gallery had opened its doors so Spalding could view such pieces as Cancelled (“Potent. This is potent.”) She walked through it wordlessly except for the occasional acknowledgment of the exhibition’s wow factor. “Somebody has to do work like this!” she exuded. Afterward, over tea and macaroons at Benoit, she summed up her impressions: “It’s almost like you can’t breathe when you first look at her work, but I want to meet this lady. I want to know her.”

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Radio Song (clip)	1:01	Esperanza Spalding
Black Gold	5:17	Esperanza Spalding

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*Radio Music Society Trailer
Esperanza Spalding at the Oscars
Black Gold
Esperanza Spalding at the Nobel Prize Ceremony

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