Preceding that was her eponymous Esperanza album, performed in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The very nature of her talent is exceptional.” That same year’s release, Radio Music Society, debuted on the Billboard Top 10 The Guardian praised its “torchy swaggers.” 2010’s Chamber Music Society was infused with what NPR dubbed “an ineffable brightness”. Co-produced by Spalding and Tony Visconti (David Bowie), the album is an electrifying take on the power trio, and is adorned with rich vocal arrangements and touches of synthesizer.Īs the NY Times mentions in their 2012 post-Best New Artist Grammy profile, Spalding “has made her mark not just as a virtuoso jazz bassist or an effortlessly nimble singer but as an exotic hybrid of the two.
The most recent, Emily’s D+Evolution, is out March 4th (Concord) and is a fresh artistic vision for Spalding–a daring tapestry of music, vibrant imagery, performance art and stage design. That channeled energy runs through her recorded catalog of seven collaborative and five solo albums. A voracious and magnetic performer, she is attentively studious towards what the process of playing live–whether sharing a stage with her own revolving ensembles, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Janelle Monae or Prince–presents to the structure of a song. Spalding is, as a composer, bassist and vocalist, expansive, iterative, shape-shifting, open, and progressively innovative. By anyone’s measure, Spalding’s accomplishments at 31 years of age have already eclipsed those of artists half a century older, yet it’s blatantly obvious that her artistic journey is a lifelong one that we’ve just begun to collectively comprehend. Four time Grammy Award winner Esperanza Spalding has, in the past decade of her illustrious career (which also involves having performed at the Oscars, the Grammys, the Nobel Prize ceremony, and several times at the White House), continually and brilliantly married genres, pushed boundaries, and created groundbreaking work.