Esperanza Spalding's Grammy hasn't changed her low-key style

Friday February 25, 2011

from The Washington Post

Esperanza Spalding’s Grammy hasn’t changed her low-key style
By Chris Richards

After shocking the universe by winning a Grammy for best new artist two weeks ago – besting the likes of Justin Bieber and Drake – Esperanza Spalding spent a week touring Japan. Then she boomeranged back to the West Coast to recharge alongside family and friends in her native Portland, Ore. This week, she jets off on a world tour that stops in Barcelona, Paris, Cape Town and . . . Frederick, Md. (She was booked to play Frederick’s Weinberg Center on March 4 long before her name was ripped out of that envelope on Grammy night. The show is sold out.)

But here’s one place the globe-trotting jazz bassist with the chirpy singing voice hasn’t been since her big Grammy win: on the Internet, where overzealous Bieber fans, who thought the teen pop sensation should have won best new artist, have been talking all kinds of digital smack on Twitter, Facebook, even on Spalding’s Wikipedia page.

The 26-year-old shrugs it off with the kind of freon cool you can feel through the telephone.

“I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t seen any of it, and I don’t want to,” she says, making green tea at her mom’s house in Portland. “Just to be totally crude, my reaction, honestly, is, ‘So what?’ “

Spalding has other pressures to cheerfully ignore, too, like becoming the poster child for 21st-century jazz. She’s the first jazz musician to win a best new artist Grammy, and many in the genre see her upset as a huge stamp of validation from the greater music industry.

Read the full article 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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