Blogs

Playing at Scullers Jazz Club might not have the cache of performing at the White House or beating Justin Bieber to win this year’s Grammy Award for Best New Artist. But that other stuff’s about celebrity. Esperanza Spalding’s rooted in jazz, regardless of how broad or glamorous the setting. Besides, fame lets you sell out six shows at Scullers, as the ex-Berklee student and professor did over the weekend.

While the lithe bassist/singer poised to further boost her mainstream profile with a more electric new CD in the new year (she’s already billed as a “funk” headliner at June’s Montreal Jazz Festival), Spalding kept her jazz straight at Scullers. Not only did she stick to acoustic bass, but she barely sang the entire weekend, which might have been a disappointment to some attendees. Instrumental jazz still yielded more than enough satisfaction, given that Spalding had pianist Geri Allen and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington rounding out her trio as musical sisters in conversation.

Sunday’s first show, a matinee benefit for the Hopes Project to bring music therapy to Mass. General Hospital, found the virtuosos “flying by the seat of our pants,” as Carrington put it -- just the way they like it.

The group focused on standards with non-standard delivery over its 75-minute set, casually mixing the accessible and the abstract. “Everything Happens to Me” built Allen’s impressionistic comping into cyclical layers with hints of Latin jazz. The trio infused Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” with robust accents, the practically demur Spalding firmly quoting the melody through her skittering bass solo. And Carrington painted undercurrents with rimshots on the edges of her drums, tapping a brush to her ride cymbal’s bell for a pulse that sounded like a toy soldier’s march on “A Child is Born,” the title track from Allen’s new Christmas album.

The three players (who have all taught at Boston music colleges) also appear on Carrington’s all-female Mosaic Project CD, which Allen saluted in light of its recent Grammy nomination. Then she mentioned Spalding’s Grammy triumph, and in a nod to the power of jazz and women in particular, Allen piped, “Somebody said, ‘Yes, we can.’”