Star on the rise at Healdsburg Jazz Festival
Young singer-bassist Esperanza Spalding keeps turning heads
By JOHN BECK
Published: Thursday, June 3, 2010
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Ever since shooting out of Portland and blowing through the Berklee College of Music, the chatty 25-year-old singer-bassist has turned heads — from the old guard to curious, non-jazz fans. Her personal blend of jazz is all over the map, punched up with Latin (especially Brazilian) rhythms, pop stylings and sassy vocals like “I know you wanted me too/Before she got to you.”
Still riding high on her popular second album, Esperanza, that peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard jazz chart, she’s jazz’s latest It Girl — whether she agrees or not.
“I’m still surprised that people consider me jazz,” she says. “People say, ‘Oh you’re jazz, you’re jazz.’ It’s cool. But it might not be like that forever. But as long as I get to work and go play, I don’t care what people call it.”
Before she returns to the Wine Country next week, Spalding took time out to chat about new music, the future of jazz and the undeniable magic of improv.
Q: So these days, you’re splitting time between New York and Austin?
A: I’ve got a place in New York in the Village, so I’m right in the heart of everything, and I come here (to Austin) to R&R and play the piano as loud as I want and drums and whatever.
Q: I want to make sure I’ve got this right: Chamber Music Society doesn’t come out until August, but judging by recent reviews, you’re already playing songs from the follow-up Radio Music Society on tour?
A: No. We just did a couple of previews like that. I just needed to go into the studio and record a few of those songs to deliver to the label because we might pre-release a couple as sneak peeks. So I thought the best thing to do would be to play it and hear what was working and what wasn’t working. On a couple of gigs we showcased a lot of the new music, but now — we can’t give it all away — we’re gonna go back to playing stuff from Esperanza and some new arrangements of older stuff.
Q: How’s life after the big New Yorker profile?
A: The same as before, I guess.
Q: I imagine it’s somewhat of a rite of passage for any artist or musician.
A: I think all of it’s great. You never know, maybe there’s some little podunk town in Wyoming and they happen to read about my music in the local paper and it really means a lot to them. That’s really important, too. Maybe the main thing is that the exposure in the New Yorker enables me to wind up in more places where people can discover the music. I don’t walk down the street and people go — ooh! I’m still a jazz musician.
Q: Do you ever get sick of talking about the future of jazz? I get the feeling you want to take it in a whole different direction.
A: I don’t care what direction it goes en masse. That’s not my job or my concern. My purpose is to create really excellent music as I see it and I hear it. Because of my background and my taste, I draw a lot of inspiration from and I love to play within the context of improvised music. And in our culture, that music is jazz. Things happen naturally in this world and culture and there’s a rise and fall of movements and tastes and cultures — and that’s all OK. That’s all part of the ebb and flow of life.
Q: Can you give me an example of something on Chamber Music Society where the improv took it in a whole different direction that really surprised you?
A: Yeah, probably the last track on the record. It’s called “Short and Sweet.” It was always a really short song and we’d play this melody and vamp on the intro and vamp on the outro and that was it. When we played it on the record, I think we did one take, and we just went off on the trio exploration and it was very melancholy and celestial, like it was floating further out into the cosmos somehow.
That was completely unexpected. I didn’t intend that to be part of the song. But then when the whole string ensemble comes back in, it snaps you back to earth and back to the title. That’s the only song on the piece that we really stretched that far away from what was written or what was created for the ensemble.
Q: That’s gotta be liberating, both playing and when you listen back to it.
A: It was really weird. Literally, none of us knew what was happening. We’re like listening back and going, “Oh OK, I guess the time is there.” But when we were playing it, it was really out there.
Q: It sounds like an out-of-body experience.
A: It kind of was — an out-of-context experience. I felt like I was experiencing — mildly experiencing — what people like Herbie (Hancock) and Ron Carter and Wayne (Shorter) spoke about, searching for that moment where they didn’t know what was happening, so they could be totally free with each other — right in that moment. That’s pure sound.
Read the original article: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100603/ENTERTAINMENT/100609888?p=1&tc=pg
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