The City Esperanza Spalding Calls Home

Wednesday July 27, 2011

From Elle

Austin Found
By:Julie Vadnal

Need proof that this Texas terrain is the it big small city? Grammy-winning bassist Esperanza Spalding just moved here. Julie Vadnal finds the beat of the jazz princess’s new home base.

Among those who dominate the prickly jazz world, 26-year-old bassist Esperanza Spalding is as rare as a four-leaf clover. And not just for her signature nimbus hairstyle. Or because she performs barefoot—“it’s more comfortable,” she says—or for enlisting Q-Tip to produce the follow-up to her 2010 fusion-jazz album, Chamber Music Society, which sent shock waves through Charlie Parker faithfuls for its Brazilian influences, fresh rhythms, and instant accessibility. It’s also for where Spalding—friends call her “Espy”—has chosen to live: Austin, a city that’s just as delightfully odd as, well, a shoeless twentysomething headlining Carnegie Hall. But asked if she’s recognized during grocery store outings or bike rides through her Travis Heights neighborhood, she just laughs and says, “I’m still a jazz musician.”

If there’s ever been a time for Top 40 outliers, this is it—alt-rock Canadians Arcade Fire stunned the Twitterati by winning the Grammy for Album of the Year over radio pets Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Eminem. That same night, wearing a chartreuse gown, custom-made by a friend of a friend, Brooklyn designer Selma Karaca, Spalding beat out Justin Bieber for Best New Artist. Now, as she embarks on a world tour, she and her once-sleepy genre have grabbed the spotlight—in tandem with the city in which she dwells.

“Austin reminds me of Portland [Oregon], my hometown,” she says, where she grew up in a low-income area with her older brother and mom, who home-schooled her children and enrolled the five-year-old Spalding in a free community band program. “What I like about both cities is that you have this incredibly diverse mix of people and political personalities, and yet everybody lives so peacefully together.” At the South Congress District’s happening Hotel Saint Cecilia, she’s fixated on Amsterdam design team Droog’s “85 Lamps” chandelier hanging in the bar. “That,” she says, pointing to its bare bulbs and exposed wires, a graceful mix of low-tech and slick, “is soooo Austin.”

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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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