By Paul Robicheau

Esperanza Spalding shocked the music world this year when she became the first jazz act to win the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. To do that, the bassist/singer/composer outpaced a pop-heavy field that included the favored Drake, Justin Bieber, Mumford & Sons, and Florence + the Machine. Frustrated beliebers flamed Spalding on Twitter and hacked her Wikipedia page.

But the Berklee-trained wunderkind doesn’t give the backlash any thought. “That’s not the crew I roll with,” says Spalding, 26. “Jazz musicians talk mess about me, too. That’s OK. There are enough people in my camp, and we learn from each other.”

Those people aren’t limited to jazz luminaries like Joe Lovano and McCoy Tyner, who featured Spalding in their bands. President Obama asked the rising star to perform both at the White House and at his Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. She’s also charmed pop royalty, performing with Stevie Wonder and Prince, who tapped Spalding to open concerts and play in private jam sessions.

Those meetings go back to New Year’s Eve 2008, when Spalding and drummer John Blackwell jammed for hours in Prince’s L.A. basement. “He’ll invite people over to his house just to hang and play and ask them what they’re into, to learn and to share— that’s the nature of our friendship,” she says. “His prowess on all the instruments is really mind-blowing, and just his musicality… Every bone in his body is screaming to make music at all times.”

That sounds a lot like the ever-busy Spalding. “That’s what we do, yes,” she says from her New York apartment. “It always feels like there’s never enough time to explore everything.”

For this year’s Newport Jazz Festival, Spalding was given carte blanche to play with whomever she wanted. The pool included performers like Anat Cohen, Uri Caine and her longtime accomplices Leo Genovese and Terri Lyne Carrington. But recently, Spalding’s spent her days in the studio, finishing her next album, Radio Music Society, for release in February. A contrast to last year’s graceful Chamber Music Society, which nodded to her orchestral grounding, the new record promises a more contemporary sound, with songs formatted so, as Spalding explains, “they could be on the radio.” She’s brought in hip-hop guru Q-Tip to produce the album, recording potential tracks with jazz associates Lovano, Carrington, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, Lionel Loueke and Lalah Hathaway.

“I’m stretching my capacity in making this record,” Spalding says. “I’m not sure how the hell it’s all going to sound when I’m done, but I like what I hear so far.”

The dexterous Spalding thrives on exploring new territory. Consider how much she’s grown since her 2008 major-label debut, Esperanza, a Brazilian-slanted album that ruled the contemporary jazz charts. It was a breezy, eclectic showcase of her talents as a bassist and vocalist (singing in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English), but it fell short of establishing an original identity. Chamber Music Society showed more sophistication and vision, opening with “Little Fly,” an existential William Blake poem gently set to strings and dreamy vocals.

“She reads a lot and studies a lot, not just music but life in general, and you have to be a well-rounded person in life to be a great artist,” says Berklee professor Carrington, who played drums on both of Spalding’s Music Society projects. “She’s a constant student. She’s not resting on what she already knows—and she knows a lot—and she knows she has so much to learn.”

Carrington, herself a onetime Berklee prodigy who toured with jazz greats Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, says that Spalding shows her
  originality as a “triple threat” at bass, vocals and
  composition. It’s an unusual combination.

“She studied classical music as well as jazz, and she’s also a product of the hip-hop generation,” Carrington says. “She’s a ‘global’ musician in the truest sense of that word. Her ethnicity is mixed-up, and she’s musically all mixed-up, too.”

Born of African-American, Hispanic, Welsh and Native American heritage, Spalding and her brother were raised by their single mother in a depressed neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. There were drugs, gangs and guns. At one point, after a neighbor was killed by a stray bullet, Spalding slept on the floor.

“There are places much worse,” she says. “The circumstances were weird and could have been dangerous, but even now, looking back in context, I realize what an amazing upbringing I had.”

Largely homeschooled because of a lengthy illness and an intuitive learning style that didn’t thrive in the classroom, Spalding took to music early, playing piano. At age four she picked up the violin after seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood; this led to a decade-long role in a community orchestra called the Chamber Music Society of Oregon. She was the concertmaster by age 15 and earned a scholarship to the music program at Portland State University, playing clarinet, oboe and guitar as well as violin and piano. But it was only when she took up the acoustic bass that she truly fell in love.

“Classical music was always part of my life, and songs on the radio, and songs that weren’t on the radio that my friends gave me—you know how musicians are,” she says. “Osmosis is a big part of who I am musically. It’s hard for me to identify all the sources. When I love something, be it Hermeto Pascoal, Becca Stevens or Jimi Hendrix, I listen to it all the time.”

Spalding has a crammed iPod, of course, but apart from her love for YouTube (she gushes about Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius singing “Birdland” on The Midnight Special), her peers’ technologic pastimes baffle her. “It impresses me that people get as much done as they do and still have time to watch TV and tweet and do e-mails,” Spalding says. “I’m amazed. I can’t do it.”

When she’s not in the studio or on tour, she practices acoustic bass in the morning (“my neighbors are gone”) and composes at night. “Airplanes are the place for [writing] lyrics, of course, and for content and language, reading is important.”

Spalding credits her management for giving her the space to do what she wants. “Young people need to make mistakes and explore and try new things,” she says. And new is what her music’s all about. “Maybe this year it sounds like pop, and in five years, it’ll sound completely different.”

 

Photo Credits from top to bottom: Clay Patrick McBride; Ed Satterwhite; Take Sato

Credits: Hair: Katsumi Matsuo for Redken; makeup: Asami Taguchi at L’Atelier NYC; wardrobe styling: Kelly Brown; dress: SONO; earrings: Perez Sanz; cuffs: stylist’s own