After learning violin as a child, Esperanza Spalding switched to bass in high school and by age 20 had become the youngest faculty member at Boston’s prestigious Berklee School of Music.
Five Grammy awards later — including a surprise 2011 win for best new artist in a field that included Justin Bieber and Drake — Spalding has established herself as a shape-shifting creator of forward-looking music that’s rooted in jazz but unbound by genre distinctions.
She’s one of the headliners of Music at the Intersection, the festival that will transform Grand Center this weekend. Other featured artists include Black Pumas, Big Boi, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue and Chahka Khan. Spalding will perform Sunday.
The latest album by Spalding is a collaboration with the great Brazilian vocalist Milton Nascimento. The two were introduced years ago by the late jazz great Wayne Shorter — with whom Spalding has cowritten an opera — and recorded the album in Brazil immediately after Nascimento completed a tour that was meant to be his farewell to performing.
Her St. Louis set will be one of the first in a long fall tour that leads to a 25-night residency at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club in February.
The bandleader’s catalog includes straight-ahead vocal jazz and musical hybrids with European classical music, soul and R&B. The songs on her 2021 album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab” were each developed to serve specific therapeutic purposes, like relieving tension or steadying the mind when starting a new romance.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin spoke with Spalding about how she navigated her early success, why she left her faculty job at Harvard University and the expansive world of Black music in which she revels.
Jeremy D. Goodwin: Early in your career you got a stamp of approval that’s about as mainstream as it gets: a Grammy for best new artist. What did that do for you in terms of opportunities in the business?
Esperanza Spalding: I think it made more people come to shows, so I could get booked more often and I could get booked in larger venues. That was the main difference. My manager at the time didn't know what to do with all of that potential, and neither did I. I actually wound up leaving my manager right after that happened.
So if there was some big, golden door that opened, we didn't really know how to walk through it or what to do with it. And I honestly think that no matter how many endorsements you get from those kind of large, music-entertainment institutions, if the music you're making doesn't fit a certain kind of allowable aesthetic, you're only going to get so far in that world.
I have always been a little insubordinate about doing what I hear, even if later I regret it. I just feel like standing by my musical inspiration is priority No. 1, and I can't compromise that. And that I think already put a cap on what I could “achieve” in whatever trajectory the winning of Best New Artist could open for you.
Goodwin: What sort of material will you feature at the festival? Will we hear much of the new album?
Spalding: It's funny, with this album we didn't create it thinking about its afterlife. It was such a project of love and just mutual care and excitement. So I think this album isn’t going to have a touring life, I’m sorry to say.
I’ve been totally immersed in this community project here in Portland called PRISMID Sanctuary and realized I need to bring some more music into my life. So instead of a big “ta-da!” conceptual thing, I just want to play and sing songs and have a super pared-down ensemble. So that's what we're bringing.
I don't know what kind of energy festivalgoers are expecting, but when I hear “music at the intersection” I think of interdisciplinary. I think of intersectionality of storytelling and ethnicities and music styles. And that's kind of where I orient naturally. So I'm trusting that the thing I already am doing will be a perfect fit for the festival.
Goodwin: Yeah, I think the festival organizers have all of that in mind, plus the geographic element of St. Louis being here in the middle of the country. But definitely telling a story of music — particularly Black, American music and its many branches and shapes and how we live with it and make it and listen to it today.
Spalding: I feel like an intersection, you know? I feel like there isn't one Black cultural identity, as we know. There isn't one Black music. There's such infiniteness and nuance in the Black experience, the Black American experience, the Black American cultural experience. Yeah, living in that is an intersection. One thing that I really appreciate about the broad header of Black music or Black cultural expression is the room we really hold for each other, and the diversity within that.
I really love playing in Black-curated festival spaces, because I just feel so welcome and it’s so expansive. It feels really good to be welcomed in the specificity of what I carry by my community.
Goodwin: And you’re perfectly comfortable calling it out when you don’t feel like that sort of environment is being created, right? When you left your faculty position at Harvard University in 2022, you said it was an institution that just was not doing the things it needed to do for you to continue being a part of it.
Spalding: It's so weird that even became a story, because I really didn't have any beef, per se. I want to say I loved my department. I loved my students. I loved what I was teaching. I really miss it. But what I realized is: Whoa, this institution is not taking accountability or responsibility for its impact on the Black community and Indigenous community, and because of where my coursework is situated I can't be receiving payment from this institution and endorsing this institution.
I was encouraged to develop coursework that would bring students into these very literal encounters of practice around de-colonial placemaking, around reparative placemaking for Black folks and Indigenous folks. And then at the 11th hour, somebody higher up somewhere was like, “No, we're not going to fund that.” It was really that message that there isn’t a pathway for me to do this work that made me want to leave — but also, realizing that my ministry is not about trying to change institutions from inside. I have infinite respect for the ones who do that.
