Esperanza Spalding: My Page (Push and Pull)

Tuesday October 26, 2010

From Relix

Esperanza Spalding: My Page (Push and Pull)
By: Esperanza Spalding

There’s something to be said for the natural evolution of all art forms. You can’t necessarily control people paying attention to (or not paying attention to) a certain idiom. Sometimes that’s OK—sometimes we need that so we can grow into the next thing.

All the arguments I make on behalf of jazz music needing to open up and allow itself to evolve past these archaic forms of expressing the music, I’ve often assumed were actually part of classical music’s tradition of holding on to the classics. However, as I’ve been reading letters, comments and editorials from some of the composers that I most look up to—Stravinsky, Wagner—their sentiments seem to be, “No, we need to let go of the past, we have to write the music that’s relative to the moment and we can’t get caught up in being obsessed with the way one person did it and trying to continually emulate and recreate it.”

The push and pull between the extremes of wanting to preserve the traditions and also wanting to look forward is healthy for the classical and jazz worlds at large. Young artists will always say, “No, we need to break the rules and move past the tradition!” But we need to have something to push against. We need to have someone who has worked to keep the traditions alive, so we can study them and then push against them, of course. Both are equally important.

To read the full article click here

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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