by Nate Chinen
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Batiste had his social music. Around the same time, Scott—who had adopted two West African surnames to become Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah—was using his own proprietary term, Stretch Music. This was in reference to a style combining postbop sophistication with the atmospheric sweep of art-rock, the loopy pull of electronic music, and the thrust and swagger of hip-hop. All of which combined with a brand-conscious image to turn Scott into a celebrity, the subject of fashion spreads as well as admiring coverage in the rock and hip-hop press.
In 2017 he invoked a checkered centenary—of the first-known jazz recordings, made by the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band—as the instigating factor for a series of three albums, which he released in staggered fashion as The Centennial Trilogy, a sort of righteous rejoinder. The music on these albums—respectively titled Ruler Rebel, Diaspora, and The Emancipation Procrastination—is fashion-forward, brash but cool, a confluence of plaintive melody and rumbling groove. Along with Scott’s bravura trumpet playing and canny atmospherics, the albums showcase several bright young improvisers, like the flutist Elena Pinderhughes and the pianist Lawrence Fields. Some tracks make adaptive use of trap rhythm, a mechanistic hallmark of southern hip-hop. Elsewhere Scott entrusts his two assertive drummers, Corey Fonville and Joe Dyson Jr., with the task of making a rigid beat seem almost to breathe.
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The album that qualified Spalding for a nomination at the 2011 Grammys—though again, probably not the driving reason for her presence there—was Chamber Music Society, released the previous summer. A taut, elegant expression of lyrical and musical interiority, it advanced her vision of chamber music. This was a concept important mainly for restrictive reasons: she wasn’t flirting with funk, or even incorporating electric instruments (beyond the occasional Fender Rhodes piano). Her coproducer was Gil Goldstein, a resourceful arranger and orchestrator who had worked on albums she admired by Joe Lovano.
Spalding established the tone of the album from the top: its overture, “Little Fly,” is a string-quartet setting of a poem from William Blake’s Songs of Experience. What follows is an original composition called “Knowledge of Good and Evil,” whose sauntering pace, pizzicato-to-arco transition, and wordless vocal melody all point in the direction of Danilo Pérez’s Latin-jazz manifesto Motherland. A track named “Chacarera,” after the Argentine folk rhythm, has a melody that bobs and whirls like a kite in high wind; it segues into a tango-esque cover of “Wild Is the Wind,” a song associated with Nina Simone (whose swooping style is duly evoked).
On another cover, of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Inútil Paisagem,” Spalding sings a duet with the gifted jazz singer Gretchen Parlato, over a background made up entirely of bass, hand percussion, and their voices, one rhythmic obbligato burbling behind the other. And on a delicate art song titled “Apple Blossom,” Spalding trades verses with the eminent Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento, expressing no evident deference. Singing together on the chorus, an octave apart, they sound like natural partners: embracing a metaphor of changing seasons, the bittersweet fluctuations of romance, a cycle of awakening and renewal.
Spalding’s validation from the Recording Academy came just as she was planning a follow-up to Chamber Music Society. She’d been thinking about pop music, and the artificial constraints that separated it from so-called art music, like jazz. She considered a couple of her role models, Wayne Shorter and Stevie Wonder—“two really positive examples of how you can play a lot of music and still be ‘accessible’ to the public at large.” But she was bemused by the very notion of “accessibility,” a word she bracketed with ironic quotes even as she spoke.
I always say that the problem with jazz “accessibility” is not the content of the music; it’s people’s ability to access it. Meaning, if you don’t already listen to the music or go to concerts, how would you hear jazz music? How would you? In a movie? If you happen to be in a city where they have a jazz station? So all of a sudden I thought, wow, this might actually be possible, to get this music out on a much larger scale.7
So with Radio Music Society, Spalding set out to create some music that might slip past the gatekeepers of an eclectic triple-A (Adult Album Alternative) format. The end result strayed a good distance from that aim. As the title suggests, Spalding envisioned this album as the yang to Chamber Music Society’s yin. She brought in a veritable congress of open-minded jazz musicians, mentors as well as peers.
At the same time, there were aspects of Spalding’s process that fell outside the usual parameters for a jazz album. Her coproducer, and the album’s executive producer, was the rapper Q-Tip. During one of her band rehearsals in New York, Prince showed up and sat quietly for several hours. (Later he called with some feedback, including a tip about “Let Her,” one of her songs-in-progress; he thought she was giving away the chorus too soon.)
Radio Music Society includes two emblematic covers: a funk-samba take on Stevie Wonder’s “I Can’t Help It,” with drifting tenor obbligato by Lovano; and “Endangered Species,” a mid-eighties Wayne Shorter fusion anthem, featuring Lalah Hathaway as a guest vocalist, singing new lyrics keyed to a conservationist message. Elsewhere, Spalding proceeds with those two touchstones clearly in mind, embracing progressive harmonies and roughly equal measures of love songs and social commentary. “Land of the Free” reflects on the exoneration of a Texas man, Cornelius Dupree Jr., after thirty years of wrongful imprisonment for rape and robbery. “Vague Suspicions” is about America’s violent incursions in the Muslim world: “They are faceless numbers in the headlines we’ve all read / Drone strike leaves thirteen civilians dead.” And Spalding conceived the album’s slow-funk lead single, “Black Gold,” as an exhortation to African-American boys, calling up a proud cultural legacy predating slavery.
These songs raise questions without pointing fingers, a distinction Spalding was eager to make. “I don’t think I’m taking a stand,” she said when I brought up the subject of protest. “I’m inviting the listener into this dialogue.”
But the songs feel better suited to a declaration than to a dialogue, I countered.
“Well, even if something sounds declarative, it’s like in a play,” she said. “With a song like ‘Black Gold,’ maybe it is declarative to say: ‘Hold your head as high as you can.’ But the character from the song is inhabiting a role as a mentor to a young child. So, hmm.”
She paused thoughtfully. “Yeah, it’s like James Baldwin said: ‘The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.’ I never want to say that I’m declaring the answers. I’m, in my own small way, declaring the questions.”8
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In 2011, Spalding put in a shift on The Mosaic Project, an album by Terri Lyne Carrington that managed to be both a crossover bid and a message album. The message, in effect, was solidarity: it’s an album made entirely by women—from the stars, like Dee Dee Bridgewater and Nona Hendryx, to the ensemble players, like pianist Helen Sung and bassist Mimi Jones. The Mosaic Project won Best Jazz Vocal Album at the Grammys, and seemed to beg for a massive mobilization on tour.
To her credit, Carrington pivoted instead to the formation of a collective trio with Spalding and Geri Allen, whose probing intuition as a pianist, composer, and educator had made her a stealth influence on the scene. The ACS Trio, as this band was called, made the rounds on tour, working with an advanced harmonic language and a liquid sense of groove. It was a true convergence of three imposingly strong artists, but the glowing center was often Spalding, both in her anchoring bass and in the waft of her “ooh”s and “aah”s as she scatted a vocal line. Allen described Spalding’s musicianship in a word: “holistic.” She clarified:
Everything she has to offer, as a human being, happens when she makes music. She is using the whole picture all the time. All of those things are coming th
rough, and they’re not interrupted. It is free and unrestricted, and it’s feeding into the moment of spontaneous composition, in a real kind of equal way. Everybody in the trio is integrating their ideas into every moment, which is thrilling for me.9
Spalding thrived in this setting; it could feel like the sort of challenging, nurturing, enlightened situation that best suited her extravagant talent. It was also unexpectedly liberating to find herself in an all-female group of peers. Speaking on a 2018 Winter Jazzfest panel about jazz and gender, moderated by Carrington, Spalding observed that the routine experience of being the only woman on the bandstand could be exhausting, if only for self-protective reasons.
You don’t notice that you’re bracing. You don’t notice that you’re sending the verbal, behavioral (and so many other -ials) message: “I am not accessible to you, in any way, except for the music. You can’t touch me. You can’t kiss me. I don’t like you. Don’t get near me energetically, because it’s not that game.” And that’s something that I think male musicians may not encounter as often. And believe it or not, that takes a lot of energy to maintain all the time. So in the trio context, at first it was weird. I didn’t know what was going on. But what happened was, I think for the first time we all were able to put all of our guard down, and just do what we came to do, once we were on the stage. Because there’s even something about eye contact. Your practice of being the only woman trains you, like you have to give eye contact back in a way that’s not inviting.10
These were everyday concerns for Spalding. But she also faced a more exotic problem: popular culture couldn’t seem to get enough of her. The night before flying to Los Angeles for the 2012 Grammys—one year after her big win—she stood on a street corner in Greenwich Village and talked about a plan taking shape for another splashy broadcast, the Academy Awards. The composer Hans Zimmer, who would be its main musical director, had a notion to form an all-star pit orchestra: a backing band of A-listers united in a workmanlike setting. Spalding was tickled by the idea. “The concept is antistardom,” she said.
Once the Oscar preparations began in Los Angeles, some hierarchical gravity reasserted itself: Zimmer now wanted Spalding to sing a number during the “In Memoriam” segment, backed by a children’s choir. At the appointed moment, she appeared onscreen in a flowing white robe with gold accoutrements to sing a stirring and pitch-perfect version of the Louis Armstrong anthem “What a Wonderful World.” (The next morning, she could be found in best-dressed-on-the-red-carpet lists in Elle and Vogue, wearing an ice-blue gown.)
The intensity of the glare on Spalding goes a way toward explaining the motive of her next move. After the album cycle for Radio Music Society was done, she disappeared for a while, returning in unrecognizable form: hair braided, chunky glasses, outfits worthy of a space opera. Her new project was something called Emily’s D+Evolution, and it came with a backstory involving the pure intentions of childhood role-play. Emily, her middle name, signified a younger self and spirit muse—and also, it seemed clear, a character and a form of cover.
During the public debut of the project, at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village in 2015, Spalding took the stage holding a small screen in front of her face, and whisked it aside with a flourish. “See this pretty girl,” she sang, as if issuing a dare. “Watch this pretty girl flow.” The tune, “Good Lava,” had a four-on-the-floor drumbeat and a gnarly guitar riff. Spalding was on electric bass, with Matthew Stevens and Justin Tyson working a muscular groove; there were sturdy vocal reinforcements, from Nadia Washington and Corey King. The rest of the show proceeded in this vein: declaratory, theatrical, and funky, with an audacious level of pretension.
When Emily’s D+Evolution was released as an album the following spring, it was a little easier to wrap your arms around the songs. They reflected a strong set of influences, including vintage Prince and Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic and Steely Dan. Her songs “Earth to Heaven” and “Noble Nobles” had the sophisticated harmony and coltish phrasing of songs from mid-to-late-seventies Joni Mitchell—the era of Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, when Jaco Pastorius was a crucial member of her studio retinue.
What Spalding did with the songs suggested some high-level multitasking: she was Joni and Jaco in the same human form. Another standout song, “Rest in Pleasure,” had a floating, Jeff Buckley–ish rock beat and a verse melody with the sort of casual chromatic feints that would cause grave problems for a lot of less nimble singers. The ambition and audacity of the project expanded Spalding’s reach, aligning her with an ascendent vogue of Afrofuturism.
But again, she wasn’t interested in wheeling away from her jazz foundation. If anything, she was pushing farther: at the 2017 Detroit Jazz Festival, she appeared with Wayne Shorter in a band that also featured Carrington and the pianist Leo Genovese. The music swooped and spiraled; she sang melodic lines almost byzantine in their chromatic complexity. She had been working on an opera with Shorter, and there were elements in this performance that seemed adapted from it. She sounded buoyant and ablaze, bending fearsome, high-modernist complexities into a sleek new shape. She made the music feel miraculous but also matter-of-fact.
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Exposure sold out its limited run, and the albums began arriving on subscribers’ doorsteps in the final weeks of 2017. Each copy, on CD or vinyl, included a scrap of paper on which Spalding had scrawled her song lyrics during the session; they were presented almost as sacred relics. Several months after its release, copies of the album were selling in online auctions for well over $100. (One sealed LP was listed at $585.)
For anyone who had watched long stretches of the livestream, hearing the album was a bit like seeing a finished jigsaw puzzle after getting acquainted with a scattering of pieces. Spalding, in the spirit of the project, included an occasional nod to her creative process; the opening track, “Swimming Toward the Black Dot,” even incorporates the sound of her marker scrawling across the page. Her lyrics often balance ornate metaphor against blunt address, notably on a waltz-time reverie called “Heaven in Pennies,” one of the album’s more memorable themes. There are also songs of romantic contentment, “I Do” prominent among them. Others get more pointed—like “Colonial Fire,” whose title is self-explanatory, and “I Am Telling You,” a firm admonition to someone making unwanted sexual advances.
The album also came with a bonus disc labeled “Undeveloped,” full of assorted outtakes and castoffs from the studio experiment. But Spalding had assigned them all track titles, as if to assert that even the ephemera was destined for something other than oblivion, worth naming and preserving. Like so much about Exposure, this gesture amounted to an expansion in the guise of a constriction. And like so much about Spalding, it was an expression of wild ambition and unshakable self-confidence couched in the most approachable form, as a gift.
Terri Lyne Carrington, The Mosaic Project (Concord)
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, The Centennial Trilogy (Ropeadope)
Esperanza Spalding, Chamber Music Society (Heads Up International)
Esperanza Spalding, Exposure (Concord)
Esperanza Spalding, Radio Music Society (Heads Up International)
11
The Crossroads
Oscar Valdés called out from behind his Batá drums, in a spirit of ritual welcome. He was voicing a traditional chant to Eleguá, the Yoruban orisha of the crossroads, with the hearty, imploring inflection you’d expect to hear in a rumba on the streets of Havana.
Valdés, an eminence among percussionists in Cuba, was in fact performing in the shadow of El Capitolio—but at the Gran Teatro de La Habana, on the proscenium stage of a baroque-revival opera house restored to aristocratic splendor. The occasion was the International Jazz Day All-Star Global Concert, a feat of both musical and diplomatic proportions, co-presented by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Orga
nization) and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. Lights blazed as multiple cameras filmed the action for broadcast, live-streaming to an audience said to be in the millions.
The concert, on April 30, 2017, had a fitting overture in that invocation to Eleguá: a solitary call that led to a collective response, as a twelve-piece band snapped into gear. They played “Manteca,” a multicultural anthem that effectively entered the world as a foundational text of Latin jazz.
At the Gran Teatro de La Habana, “Manteca”—composed in 1947 by the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo and the bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (with input from Gil Fuller, an arranger in Gillespie’s band)—served as a shorthand, ratifying the longstanding musical dialogue between Cuba and the United States and hinting at broader notions of solidarity. The band was stocked with musicians from more than a dozen countries, and some of them took turns firing off compact pyrotechnic displays: first the Russian tenor saxophonist Igor Butman; then a Cuban counterpart, Carlos Miyares; then the American alto saxophonist Antonio Hart. When the action shifted to the trumpet section, the personnel was no less diverse, comprising Till Brönner, from Germany; Takuya Kuroda, from Japan; and Julio Padrón, from Cuba.
This United Nations of musical convergence wasn’t just intentional; it was largely the point. The annual event known as International Jazz Day—a brainchild of Herbie Hancock, acting in his dual capacities as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador and chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz—had been conceived to elevate jazz’s stature while demonstrating the upside of globalization.1 (The first edition of the All-Star Global Concert, in 2012, had in fact been held at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York.) Along with a gala concert, there were satellite activities in countries around the world—195 in all, according to the official tally in 2017.
