by Nate Chinen
Spalding has the animated charisma of a precocious student in a gifted-and-talented program, which may well be the by-product of lived experience. She was a frank, disarming, and weirdly magnetic presence throughout her studio residency, even in the long stretches that amounted to one or another form of drudgery. By three p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday (30 HOURS IN), she could be seen at a white-lacquered upright piano in what resembled a utility closet, obsessively worrying two or three bars of a serpentine line. She seemed tired. Her hair was tied back, her posture slumped. She kept clearing her throat. That little tendril of melody, spiky with tritone dissonance, was ungainly. She hammered away at that irksome phrase for over an hour.
Other moments during Exposure fell closer to a conventional recording session. A visitor checking the stream around hour thirty-nine would have caught Spalding laying instrumental tracks with Glasper, keyboardist Ray Angry, drummer Justin Tyson, and guitarist Matthew Stevens. They were playing the final take of one of her new inventions, a major-key reverie in floating waltz time. She sang instructions, calling audibles, as they played. This action was suitable for a highlight reel; one bootleg video lifted from the stream, seven and a half minutes in duration, quickly racked up more than a hundred thousand views on YouTube.
The larger motivation behind Exposure was twofold. On the one hand, it was an experiment in spartan creative focus, and a tribute to the almighty power of a deadline. “There’s no editing,” Spalding declared in one of the video teasers for the project, posted to social media. “There’s no tweaking, fixing, planning, prepping.” She seemed excited by this beat-the-buzzer aspect of her self-imposed challenge—convinced that the added pressure could only result in a finer result, a diamond crushed from a lump of coal.
On the other hand, of course, Exposure was a canny publicity stunt—a way into the public conversation at a time when one usually had to shout to be heard. A couple of days before the countdown clock began, she performed a spontaneous, hour-long duet with the architect Frank Gehry. The session, streamed on Facebook courtesy of Architectural Digest, took place in a light-filled atrium of Gehry’s home studio in Los Angeles. While Spalding sang and played, he sketched at an easel. (His charcoal line drawings, conveying a sort of loose, noodly panache, were later auctioned for charity along with a recording of her improvisations.)
So it was a gimmick, yes. But even a viewer predisposed toward cynicism would have had to admit that something audacious was afoot. Exposure was the rare peek behind the curtain that managed not to be demystifying, because it rested on a bedrock faith that Spalding was in possession of all the tools—the wit, the stamina, the creative fortitude—to come out looking sharp. It also employed a useful strategy familiar to teachers and magicians alike: show your work.
On her final night in the studio, at 9:05 Pacific Time, Spalding finalized the form of an intimate ballad, alone in the booth with her bass. “Okay, I have the last song,” she said, to no one and everyone. She paused. “Let’s go ahead and grab this last song,” she said to her engineer. “I’ll just do it, no click, just bass and voice, so I can get it.” Moments later, it was in the can: a love song, flowery but firm, with an elegant melody girded by a disarming clarity of intention. The title, she decided out loud, would be “I Do.”
The next day, after she’d stolen a few hours of sleep and recorded some finishing vocal tracks, the production of her new album ended with this very song. Someone popped a bottle and handed her a flute of champagne, at which point she broke the fourth wall one last time.
“It was weird and wonderful,” she said of the whole studio experiment. “I had no idea what we were doing, and I didn’t even fully understand why, but I felt there was some magic to be conjured in the immediacy of creating, creating without any place to hide.”
Then she emerged, blinking, into the daylight. Outside the gate to the studio parking lot, a crowd of strangers, tipped off by her management, had assembled to surprise her with a congratulatory clamor.
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The first time “Esperanza Spalding” became a social media trending topic, it was fueled in part by indignant astonishment. This was on the evening of February 13, 2011, when Spalding upset the field to win Best New Artist at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. The other nominees in the category were more familiar, in pop-culture terms, by several orders of magnitude. Along with the thump-and-strum folk-rockers Mumford & Sons and Florence + the Machine, they included Drake, then the glummest prom date in hip-hop, and Justin Bieber, a pop-R&B heartthrob inhabiting the body of a child. It was Bieber’s hardcore fan base—the Beliebers—who put in the hard work to make Spalding’s name go viral, with a generous accompaniment of sputtering invective.
Spalding seemed as surprised as anyone when she walked onstage to accept her honor, in pink platform heels and a citron gown of deconstructed chiffon. “Thank you to the academy for even nominating me in this category,” she said on reaching the podium. “Thank you to the incredible community and family of musicians I’m so blessed to be a part of.”1 Her words conveyed not only gracious humility but also a sense of tribal belonging.
For any jazz observer, the moment evoked another recent Grammy memory: Herbie Hancock’s dark-horse triumph at the 2008 awards, when River: The Joni Letters took home Album of the Year. (The marquee competition in that nominee pool came from Back to Black, by Amy Winehouse, and Graduation, by Kanye West—each a classic of its kind.) “I’d like to thank the academy for courageously breaking the mold this time,” Hancock said after gathering his composure, “and in doing so, honor[ing] the giants upon whose shoulders I stand—some of whom, like Miles Davis, John Coltrane—unquestionably deserved this award in the past.”
Hancock was obviously a special case: not just one of the finest pianists of his generation but also a distinguished elder and a crossover pioneer, precisely the sort of guy to earn the trust of the Recording Academy establishment. At the 53rd Grammys, hours before Spalding’s coup, he snagged two awards himself, Best Improvised Jazz Solo and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, for an all-star event album called The Imagine Project.
Spalding stood at a different place on the career continuum in 2011. But like Hancock, she had the benefit of spectacular proficiency, a boundless musical concept, and the ability to reach audiences both highbrow and hoi polloi. She was twenty-six, but hardly green. She had performed by request at both the White House and the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. She’d been the face of a Banana Republic ad campaign. She’d been handpicked by Prince to open a spate of his arena shows. One full year before stepping onto the Grammy stage, she was the subject of a glowing profile in The New Yorker—an honor extended to the smallest handful of jazz musicians.
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More important than any of this, though, was the regard that Spalding had earned in her field. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, the second child of a mixed-race single mother, she’d shown early musical promise: her lightbulb moment came at age five, when she saw cellist Yo-Yo Ma perform on an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She began playing violin in a free community orchestra, the Chamber Music Society of Oregon, and was its concertmaster by age fifteen. Once she took up the bass, discovering an instant communion with the instrument, she worked her way into Portland’s close-knit jazz scene; her mentor was a trumpeter named Thara Memory, a taskmaster who pushed her to strive beyond the dimensions of her natural talent.
Spalding attended a private arts high school on scholarship, but dropped out before graduating. She accepted an invitation to study music at Portland State University, where her teachers quickly recognized her gift, recommending that she apply to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Berklee offered another full scholarship, and she enrolled in 2002.
During her first semester she was placed in an advanced ensemble class led by the saxophonist Joe Lovano. “From the first tune we played together, I fe
lt like she contributed to the music,” he later recalled. “She had a beautiful, flowing feel, and she played with a real melodic approach within the bass part, right away. She made me feel like playing.”2 Lovano continued working with Spalding in school ensembles, and then took her out on tour. I first saw her in person on a Lovano gig in 2006, breezily anchoring a quartet alongside the Cuban drummer Francisco Mela, another Berklee discovery, and a veteran pianist, James Weidman. (This personnel would eventually morph—with the addition of a second drummer, Otis Brown III—into the excellent working band Us Five.)
Spalding released the first album under her name in 2006: a springy, cosmopolitan trio outing called Junjo, featuring Mela and another proficient Cuban, the pianist Aruán Ortiz. Released on AYVA Musica, a small label in Barcelona, the album served as an official notice of arrival. The bass was at the heart of the enterprise, and while Spalding hadn’t yet nailed down the finer points of her intonation, she sounded both rooted and buoyant. She also sang on almost every track—mainly in a wordless patter, deploying her clear, light-gauge vocal timbre as a dynamic frontline instrument. When she did sing lyrics, they were in Spanish—notably on a spare, bass-and-vocal arrangement of “Cantora de Yala,” an Argentine folk song by Gustavo “Cuchi” Leguizamón and Manuel Castilla. Like the rest of the album, it radiated freshness, charisma, and a sort of youthful, unguarded enthusiasm.
The drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, a former prodigy herself, joined Berklee’s faculty in 2006 and soon encountered Spalding. The first time they played together, Carrington was struck by the ease of their rapport, the way they both instinctively subdivided the beat. And she noticed something else besides: “the fact that she dances on the bass. I was aware of not feeling weighted down by the way she plays. Many bass players, I feel a weight on me. The sound is either really big and huge, or their time feel is kind of like a Mack truck. Not floating.”3
Whether it was Spalding’s instincts as a vocalist or her formative training as a violinist—in both cases, the action occurs well above bass clef—she did approach the bass with a light, bounding step. But it wasn’t as if she lacked a fullness of tone, or shrugged off the duties of the low end. She just envisioned her primary role less as a bedrock than as a catalyst. “In the moment, with the band, I’m just trying to play the bass parts that make the music stronger,” she said. “And make it more beautiful or more whole-sounding, or create density where there needs to be density, or intensity where there needs to be intensity, or space or an emotion or a color. And the same is true when soloing. It’s not about a shape or a pattern. You just are really trying to translate what you’re receiving in that moment in the format of sound.”4
By the time Spalding released her American debut, Esperanza, in 2008, her name was familiar to many jazz musicians and close observers of the scene. Notably, the album presented her, first and foremost, as a singer-songwriter. Lyrically speaking, the results could skew a little callow, but the musical foundation was never less than sure. And a few of the songs were outright keepers. “Precious,” a soulful, insouciant retort to a lover’s unreasonable expectations, was one of these. So too were “I Know You Know,” a playful bolt of flirtation over a percolating Afro-Cuban beat, and “Fall In,” a dreamy reverie performed with only piano accompaniment, from Leo Genovese.
The crossover success of Esperanza was striking enough to inspire some earnest, inevitable rumblings in the press about the new life Spalding was breathing into jazz. (Her first name, of course, means “hope.”) While she’d released a thoughtful follow-up to Esperanza by the time of the 2011 Grammy Awards, it was more this general idea—extraordinary talent pressed into the service of an enlightened art form—that propelled her into the winner’s circle.
With some hindsight, the calculus behind her shocking win looked explicable, almost obvious. According to one plausible theory, Bieber and Drake, a pair of boyish Canadians tilling American R&B soil, split one big voting bloc. Florence + the Machine and Mumford & Sons—two English bands, with a common denominator of yelping catharsis—split another bloc. That left only Spalding and her singular, effervescent prowess. Virtuosity has always played well with the academy, and so has the comforting vision of a brilliant young artist creating what you might inadvisably call Real Music.
In that regard, it was easy to envision Spalding as a spiritual successor to Norah Jones, whose five-category sweep in 2003 had included the Best New Artist award. Jones was another singer-songwriter who’d parlayed her sterling jazz education into a mainstream musical career. And in the years since collecting her first batch of awards, Jones had become part of the Grammy gentry: in 2011 she took the stage for a Dolly Parton tribute, belting out “Jolene” alongside John Mayer and Keith Urban.
Similarly, if you had tuned in to the preshow webcast—the part of the Grammys in which most of the awards are bestowed, with the genial efficiency of a church raffle—you would have seen Esperanza working the stage as cohost, in a tag team with her fellow vocal chameleon Bobby McFerrin. They opened the program by taking a brisk jog through Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance” and proceeded to accept dozens of awards on behalf of absentee recipients. “The podium accepts,” Spalding said repeatedly, cradling a Grammy in her arms.
But there was also a less obvious precedent to consider. Flashing back to the 26th Annual Grammy Awards, when Herbie Hancock and Wynton Marsalis each clocked their first wins, you could almost envision Spalding as the fulfillment of an unspoken dream—the next-generation by-product of a truce between warring factions. She was “Rockit” and Haydn and “Knozz-Moe-King,” all seamlessly combined in one stylish and forward-looking package.
Or maybe she was none of the above, and wouldn’t hold still long enough to let such a reductive narrative calcify around her. Maybe the most radical thing about Spalding wasn’t her world-beating talent, but the fact that she felt no particular compulsion to fit it into a frame.
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She isn’t alone in that regard, not even at her echelon of visibility. The same radiant confidence and omnivorous instincts emanate from the pianist and singer Jon Batiste, who in 2015 became the bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. A network flagship reaching an average of three million viewers, the show typically opens with Batiste out front, his lanky frame in a tailored suit, hyping the audience in the elegant Ed Sullivan Theater. Often you see him with his melodica—a toylike wind instrument that Colbert delights in calling a “face piano.” According to age-old late-night custom, there’s a brief welcome before the band kicks in with the show’s theme, a Batiste original with a staccato hook and a pop-gospel progression. The interstitial music on the show is a stylistic grab bag, but it often bends meaningfully toward jazz.
Batiste is a former prodigy from one of the leading musical families in New Orleans, and he spent the decade before his television gig making a name in New York. His youthful poise at the piano, and his mastery of a jazz language stretching back to ragtime, earned him a glowing reputation from the start. (I first saw him in concert when he was a freshman at Juilliard, making a featured appearance on a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert with Wynton Marsalis.)
Five weeks before making his Late Show debut, Batiste and his rangy band, Stay Human, played the main stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. The week before that, they’d done the same at the Newport Folk Festival. Seeing them at work in both settings underscored Batiste’s savvy and intuitive connection with an audience. For the Folk Festival, he tailored his set list and delivery to an ideal congruent with that event’s north star, the folksinger Pete Seeger. His Jazz Festival set put more emphasis on improvisation, with a high-impact horn section. Both performances ended with a trademark: a euphoric parade through the crowd, with Batiste tootling phrases on his melodica like a Pied Piper of the second line.
“I’m not out to be an ambassador for an art form,” Batiste said backstage after his Newport Jazz Festiv
al performance, “because ultimately I feel like your playing does that.”5 He was sharing a couch with his core bandmates, the saxophonist Eddie Barbash and the drummer Joe Saylor, and reflecting on his public profile, which was about to grow exponentially.
While he proudly identifies as a jazz musician, Batiste has few hang-ups about the sanctity of the style. He prefers to use the term “social music,” which makes no claim on any genre. Batiste described it to me as “a declaration,” a self-defining banner he could wave. When Stay Human released its first studio album, in 2013, Social Music was the obvious title, an accurate descriptor that doubled as a statement of pride and purpose.
New Orleans had something to do with Batiste’s deep yet flexible foundation as a musician, and it hardly seems a coincidence that another musician of his scope hails from similar circumstances. The trumpeter Christian Scott was born into a prominent Mardi Gras Indian tribe, and from the age of a preschooler he was masking as a Spy Boy—the scout who struts ahead of the Big Chief and his procession, in a riot of bright plumage, intricate beadwork, and ritual patter. The Spy Boy’s main function is to be on the alert for rival tribes. He practices a cherished custom passed down from one generation to the next, but he’s also ahead of the pack, looking for trouble.
Scott showed abundant early promise as a jazz musician, much like his uncle Donald Harrison Jr., an alto saxophonist also proudly known as Big Chief of the Congo Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group. Scott would later characterize his precocious musical emergence as the simple fulfillment of a birthright: “I had damn near been bred to be the next guy in the line of New Orleans great trumpet players. That was actually in the bloodline.”6 As he understood it, this was at once a noble calling to embody and a rigid expectation to resist.