Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article “New Note: Esperanza Spalding’s Music” by John Colapinto (©2010 by Condé Nast).

In 2008, the prodigiously gifted bassist, singer, and composer Esperanza Spalding released her major-label debut, Esperanza, which she recorded as a twenty-three-year-old instructor at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. While the music was indisputably jazz, it suggested an almost bewildering array of influences—fusion, funk, soul, rhythm and blues, Brazilian samba and Cuban son, pop balladry, chanted voealese—with lyrics sung in Spalding’s three languages: English, Portuguese, and Spanish. An ebullient mash-up of sounds, styles, and tongues, the record seemed like something new—jazz for the iPod age—and it rose quickly to No. 3 on the Billboard jazz chart, and stayed on the chart for sixty-two weeks. The freshness and the excitement of her approach have led, inevitably, to her being called the “new hope for jazz.”

Spalding, born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, to a single mother of African American, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic heritage, belongs to a growing movement of young musicians who have taken a less traditional approach to the music. For years, young jazz musicians adopted a near slavish devotion to sounding like players from jazz’s golden age (anywhere between the nineteen-twenties and the arrival of the Beatles in America, in 1964), rejecting the pop, rock, and fusion experimentation that came in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. The members of the Young Lions movement, with Wynton Marsalis the most visible among them, fetishized staunchly noncommercial “pure” jazz.

Attendance at jazz concerts has been declining for years; a hit jazz album today might sell forty thousand copies worldwide. Esperanza has so far sold more than a hundred thousand. This is, in part, because Spalding hews closer to dance rhythms than many of her contemporaries do. (Jazz has become increasingly complicated, piling on odd meters and abstruse melodies.) It is also because she sings; for audiences put off by the cerebral rigors of instrumental improvisation, her pliant alto voice gives them something to hang on to. But her original songs sacrifice none of the melodic sophistication and harmonic interest of jazz; and she is as technically adept, and as serious a student of the music’s history, as the most dutiful of the Young Lions.

Spalding is passionate about bringing fresh influences, voices, and idioms to the music, to prevent jazz from becoming merely “a museum piece,” as she put it. In the course of a year, she plays a hundred and fifty concert dates around the world. In 2009, she played at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, in Oslo, Norway. The schedule sharply limits the time she has for writing new material and practicing. She moved to Texas last fall in part because it offers seclusion for working and writing.

In mid-January, Spalding spent a few days in a state-of-the-art recording facility in New Jersey, overseeing the recording of the string arrangements for her new album, Chamber Music Society. Present at the sessions was Gil Goldstein, a jazz accordion player and Grammy-winning arranger and producer. Hired as an arranger for the project, Goldstein had tweaked Spalding’s string parts for the number “Apple Blossom.” Although the two had worked smoothly through most of the session, Spalding balked at the changes to the song.

“Your string parts are too busy,” Spalding told him, as they sat on a sofa in the studio’s control room.

“Busy?” Goldstein echoed, laughing. “No way!”

“It’s so delicate—I don’t want it to get too dense.”

Spalding insisted on reverting to her earlier, simpler arrangement. Goldstein assented, then went into the soundproofed studio and began conducting the trio of violin, cello, and viola. But Spalding was not hearing what she wanted. She took the baton from Goldstein, who surrendered it without complaint. (He later told me that he likes it when a musician knows what he or she wants, and that it makes for a better recording.) She put on headphones and, following the sheet music spread out in front of her on the conductor’s podium, guided the musicians through the session. At one point, she demanded a retake when she wanted the violinist to play a certain note with an upward bow motion, rather than a downstroke. Later, she asked the violinist to play a series of notes by plucking the strings. She was unsatisfied with the sound.

“Maybe make that plucking more like bells—ting, ting, ting,” she said.

The violinist mimicked the motion she had mimed at the podium and brought out a bell-like sound.

“Yes!” Spalding said.