Photograph by Alice O’Malley. Styled by Susan Winget. Fashion assistants: Tasha Cain and Jessica Dell. Hair by Chuck Amos for Bumble and Bumble at Jump. Makeup by Asami Taguchi at L’Atelier NYC.RHAPSODY IN PINK — The jazz virtuoso, who thinks nothing of crisscrossing musical styles, in a Valentino dress, $5,500, and shoes, $745. Call (212) 772-6969. Dior Fine Jewelry earrings, $3,700. Call (800) 929-3467.The contrast between the Esperanza Spalding that you see onstage and the offstage Esperanza, jazz bassist and singer, was not immediately apparent at breakfast the day after her big sold-out show at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the kickoff of her summer tour. Onstage she is luminous, a major chord of exuberance, swinging behind her stand-up bass, eyes closed, singing to the lights, an evangelist of joy in various cool time signatures. At breakfast, meanwhile, she was soft-spoken and contemplative, almost demure.
Granted she was rushed, due to fly promptly to Paris, and then on to Prague and Montreux, Switzerland, where old jazz heads and new were already buying tickets to catch her live, performing from “Chamber Music Society,” the album that made her the first pure jazz musician to win the Grammy for Best New Artist.
“Excuse me, but you were phenomenal,” the woman sitting at the next table said to her. “No really, I mean just wonderful.”
“Oh, thanks!” Spalding said, a little surprised. “That’s nice of you to say.” Spalding was fairly conspicuous in the Hyatt’s breakfast lounge, less so for her trademark hair, which was tied up in a blue-and-white print scarf, than for her smile, more Zen than a 26-year-old should be allowed. When the fan exited, Spalding shook her head. “I mean, I just can’t tell anymore.” The concert, in fact, could easily have been just so-so; rust threatened the players. “We faced a little bit of pure air, if you see what I mean,” her piano player, Leo Genovese, said afterward. Genovese is an Argentinian composer and a hot bandleader himself, of the Chromatic Gauchos. “We hadn’t played together for weeks!”
They had opened, as usual, with “Little Fly,” a William Blake poem Spalding put to music; it’s the album’s hit, beginning with violin and Spalding, the bassist, combing out just a few silky chords, while her singing on top was impossibly tranquil. The crowd melted during “Inútil Paisagem,” an Antonio Carlos Jobim composition that Spalding sang in Portuguese. At some point, she closed her eyes. “I can concentrate better on sound when I’m not using up my brain space with sight,” she said with a laugh.
After two encores and a couple of standing ovations, the band was backstage, relaxed and relieved, and Spalding was navigating streams of well-wishers. “Here comes my Brazilian family!” Spalding said.“There’s gonna be a lot of crazy hair!” By Brazilian family she meant the family of Milton Nascimento, the legendary Brazilian vocalist — he sings on “Chamber Music Society.” If you substitute the phrase “Brazilian jazz” with “opera,” then this is like having Pavarotti’s family travel to a distant city to hear you sing. Thus, postshow greeting and chatting wasn’t over till after midnight, and by morning, when she should have been packing, she was uncharacteristically lazy. Suddenly against plan, she ducked out to the rooftop of the Hyatt, to imbibe the sweet summer air. It was then that I saw the other Esperanza — unnoticed by fans, all by herself. She had taken off her blazer and was wearing a black tank top, her long, bass-conditioned arms pointing out from the corner of the concrete-heavy hotel. With her almost mystical smile, she resembled nothing less than a bowsprit, leading, for a glorious Montreal morning, anyway, the crazy ship of jazz.
NOTE WORTHY — Spalding grew up in Portland, Ore., the daughter of a single mother who was also a music lover. Oscar de la Renta dress, $13,990. At Bergdorf Goodman. Call (800) 558-1855. KC Designs earrings, $10,000. AtFragments. Call (212) 334-9588. Jimmy Choo shoes, $795. Call (866) 524-6687.NOT THAT SHE’S QUIET, REALLY, especially when you get her revved up — on the what-is-jazz-anyway issue. “Nobody has the guts to say it to my face, but some people in the jazz community don’t think I am doing real jazz,” Spalding said, a little perturbed. This comes from the old anti-jazz prejudice: if it is popular, it can’t be jazz — a reason they recategorized Norah Jones from jazz to pop when she got popular. But Spalding is jazz, all right. In terms of genetics, her bass playing, classically articulated, is a lot like her voice: light but strong, not afraid of melody or happiness. Nor is she averse to pure scat — scat being that ancient (20th century) form of wordless vocal improvisation that the young people who watched her beat out Justin Bieber for 2010’s best new artist might have mistaken for a new kind of tweet.
Notice, by the way, that Esperanza Spalding doesn’t do a lot of tweeting. She is lo-fi and low-key, the kind of person who relaxes by doing some laundry and cleaning at home, one place in the West Village, one in Austin, Tex.
Notice too that she did not come out of nowhere; she has been working in the trenches for her entire adult life. She grew up in a tough neighborhood in Portland, Ore., in the ’90s, when Portland was having a rough time. She was partly home-schooled but also spent time at Northwest Academy, a prestigious private school. “The point being that our life was determined by the circumstances,” she said. “We pressed through a lot of things, good things and bad things, and that’s O.K.”
She believes that music first got into her head at home via the holiday albums of Harry Belafonte and Stevie Wonder. She remembers listening to their Christmas albums way past the season. Then there was her mother, a music lover and single parent of two. “She would make up songs for everything: if you fell she’d sing a song, or if you hurt yourself, she’d sing a song.”
Eventually, the young violin student ended up with a G.E.D. and at 16 got a spot at Portland State University, where she studied bass in the classical program and moved out on her own. In Portland, a quiet jazz oasis, Spalding was tutored by the likes of Thara Memory, a composer and trumpeter who has done time with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to the Commodores. “I’m either playing music or I’m doing a bunch of stuff that I don’t want to be doing,” she told a reporter at the time.
She won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, and in 2005 was named an instructor, one of its youngest ever. In 2008 her album “Esperanza” was warmly received. Vibe magazine punned on her sporty surname: Spalding’s “got game — and has no hang-ups about showing it.” In 2009, she recorded “Chamber Music Society,” a jazz record with strings attached, as well as a large universe of influences that has as much to do with the orchestral arrangement of Gil Evans as it does with the pop songs of Bobby McFerrin. John Schaefer, host of WNYC’s “Soundcheck,” featured Spalding before, as in pre-Grammy. “She really does represent that coming together of different types of musical genres that we used to think of as discrete,” Schaefer said. “It’s not that she’s crossing over borders. It’s that she’s saying, ‘I’m not even going to acknowledge that these borders are even there.’ ”
“She’s extremely intelligent,” said Terri Lyne Carrington, the drummer on “Chamber Music,” who played with Herbie Hancock as a young protégée herself. “I am a whole generation ahead of her and I learn all the time when I am around her.”
Spalding has a healthy criticism of her own bass playing. “I’m not a master of my craft. I am still a student. I have achieved a certain level of efficiency,” she said. “Some things are not together, which is O.K. because I’m young, because I will get this together.”
Gerald Herbert/Associated PressSpalding plays for President Obama at the White House in 2009.HOW DO YOU FOLLOW UP A GRAMMY for a semi-experimental jazz CD? Part 2 of the same double CD. Spalding explained: “Everything is scheduled something like two years ahead, and back at the beginning of 2009, I had this idea for a double album. And I thought, On one CD there will be these radio songs, songs with a chorus, a hook, a little more friendly maybe to the uninitiated listener. And on the other, there would be these more experimental compositions.” As it went, the second one was released first, the opposite of what most marketers would have advised, though fortuitous-seeming now. “I think my label thought that was a huge mistake to put out the first one,” she said. Even she had her doubts. “I thought, Oh, well, at least we can go to France and play some French festivals.”
She defines a radio song biographically. “You imagine a 14-year-old girl who is driving with her sister, just diggin’ it,” she said. You also imagine it jazz tinged. A model from an earlier time: Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark,” the album with David Crosby and Graham Nash singing harmony, and Joe Sample (from the Crusaders) playing jazz piano, or Mitchell’s live album “Shadows and Light” with Michael Brecker on sax and Pat Metheny on guitar. You imagine a radio song being vaguely Stevie Wonder-esque, and in fact, though most of the songs are written by Spalding, one is a cover of a Wonder tune on which Joe Lovano solos. “I had an older brother and a mother who loved music, and when we would drive somewhere the radio would be on,” Spalding said. “And I think that’s how people my age experienced music.”
She has played at the White House, at a concert honoring Wonder, one of her heroes (“Did you know Herbie Hancock plays the Fender Rhodes on ‘Songs in the Key of Life?’ ” she said), and then played again at President Obama’s Nobel award ceremony. “The president was just very sweet — I would just like to point that out.” She would open the Paris show with her de rigueur flourish. For her Grammy performance, she wore a jacket designed by Suno, but onstage in Montreal, just before the curtains opened, under a small spotlight at stage right, she took off a trench coat to sit down in a little living room, a prop. In high-waisted and tapered linen trousers and a sleeveless blouse, she poured a glass of wine, took off her shoes, then made her way slowly to the bass and microphone, the backlight working a halo effect in her free-style hair.
“I sort of start with quirky sophisticated,” she said. “It’s a play off the idea of chamber music. And then I take the coat off. I think that for a lot of people, going to a concert is at the end of the day, and it’s their winding-down space.” At some point, she took off her trademark dangling red bracelet, picked up in the West Village. “That’s from the shop around the corner from me in my neighborhood,” she said. “The lady there told me that some people in Tibet can’t afford coral, which is supposed to bring you success and happiness, so they use glass. So this is a poor man’s good luck charm. I give them to all my friends.”
She is quiet about her dating life, but suffice it to say she is not big on wild nights out on the town, either in New York or in Austin, where she spends part of the year. “I’m not a partyer,” she said. “The most I ever do is go to a concert or see a movie.” She Skypes with friends on her computer, and reads; she’s in between “Staying Alive” by Vandana Shiva, the eco-feminist, and the poems of Emily Dickinson. She is a certified homebody, who, yes, enjoys practicing. “I’m a pretty introverted person,” she explained. “I mean, I like to be by myself. The identity of me, the personal me, outside of work is, you know, being a musician. So my life fuels my work.”
Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesCENTER STAGE — Spalding, performs a tribute to Prince in 2010.DURING A WEEK that she booked in the studio, working hard to wrap up vocals on “Radio Music Society,” due out in February, Spalding spent her nights at Iridium Jazz Club in Times Square, doing a gig with Mike Stern, the guitarist. It was Stern’s show — Spalding was the bass player — and Stern was great, a powerhouse guitar player, magnanimous and infectious, who started at 22, with Blood Sweat and Tears, and then in the ’80s played with Miles Davis. Stern was charmed to play with Spalding — the gig was booked before the Grammys, and when she insisted on laying back, Stern pushed her to play more. “She swings her ass off, man. I mean she’s got great timing.” he said. “And I love her electric playing — I think it’s really happening.”
There was one song, a Stern composition entitled “Wishing Well,” on which Spalding played electric bass and sang, and the audience looked as if it would faint from happiness. For his part, Stern was blown away in the dressing room before they even got onstage. They had been talking Bach. “My mom used to play Bach on the piano around the house,” Stern said. Spalding asked him about a particular fugue, playing the bass part. “I don’t recognize it,” Stern said. At that point, Spalding simultaneously played the bass part and sang the top part, a feat.
“She’s special, I’ll tell you,” Stern said, chuckling. “That really knocked me out. We were all really quite impressed. She’s very cool.”
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