Esperanza Spalding: A whole new fever

Monday June 20, 2011

from The National Post

Esperanza Spalding: A whole new fever

By Mike Doherty
June 21, 2011

Even before her Grammy Award for best new artist, Esperanza Spalding was being touted in jazz circles as a great new hope for the genre. And when the double bassist who sings like a streetwise angel beat Justin Bieber and Drake at the awards in February, media everywhere picked up the tune.

Spalding shrugs at her perceived importance to jazz — “The music will be fine no matter what happens,” she says — but nonetheless she’s not shirking the mantle being placed on her shoulders. She hopes to help bring the music she loves back into the mainstream.

“I don’t think we’re in a dry spell of listener capacity and listener understanding,” she says, on the phone from her Manhattan apartment a few weeks before heading to Montreal for the city’s 32nd International Jazz Festival. “I just think we’re in a dry spell of the diversity of information that’s shared on a large scale.” She believes everyone is well-equipped to appreciate many styles of music — jazz included — if they’re exposed to them and offered what she calls “the key” to unlock what might otherwise seem to be an “abstract game.”

Spalding, who grew up the child of a single mother in the violent projects of Portland, Ore., cut her teeth in jazz at Boston’s Berklee School of Music. There, her instructor, guitarist Pat Metheny, told her she had the “X factor” — not so much the Simon Cowell-approved ability to sing cookie-cutter pop, but the ability to become a star by forging her own path. By the time she was 20, six years ago, Spalding was the school’s youngest-ever instructor. Her 2006 debut, Junjo, was a striking trio record with a Cuban influence, and her second release, Esperanza, showed the range of her talent as a songwriter and arranger branching out from jazz into soul and pop.

She took a left turn with last year’s Chamber Music Society, an ambitious all-acoustic album with complex string arrangements. Clearly it impressed Grammy judges, although it didn’t cross over very far beyond jazz audiences: cue the army of Bieber fans asking “Who the *#$@! is Esperanza Spalding?”

“It was all baloney,” Spalding says of the Twitter firestorm, exasperation evident in her voice. “It isn’t even worth a good expression to describe how worthless all of that silliness was.”

“I don’t think it’s helpful to receive news flashes about someone’s angriness, especially unconstructive angriness. It’s like, ‘Don’t they have something better to do?’ ”

Spalding, meanwhile, was in Japan touring and also plotting her next project: an album called Radio Music Society, to be produced by hip-hop icon Q-Tip and feature jazz luminaries such as saxist Joe Lovano (in whose band she regularly plays) and drummer Jack DeJohnette.

Read the full article here

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

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Watch what's on

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

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