Excellent New Yorker article by John Colapinto profiling buzzworthy jazz bassist Esperanza Spaulding (read as I watched an anti-climactic K-State/BYU matchup)...

ABSTRACT: PROFILE of musician Esperanza Spalding. Not long ago, Esperanza Spalding, the prodigiously gifted bassist, singer, and composer, performed at Yoshi’s, a sushi restaurant and jazz club in Oakland, California. Spalding, twenty-five years old, was playing bass with the pianist McCoy Tyner, who, as part of the John Coltrane Quartet in the early sixties, helped create some of history’s most influential jazz music. Also performing with them were Ravi Coltrane and Francisco Mela. Female instrumentalists have been a rarity in jazz. Spalding, a slender, light-skinned black woman with a natural Afro, produced bursts of booming fragmented notes that drew gasps from the crowd. After the concert, she said, the performance “kind of reaffirmed my understanding of the music... Idol worship doesn’t help this music in any way.” In 2008, Spalding released her major-label début, “Esperanza,” which she recorded as a twenty-three-year-old instructor at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. While the music was indisputably jazz, it suggested an almost bewildering array of influences—fusion, funk, soul, R. & B., Brazilian samba and Cuban son, pop balladry, chanted vocalese—with lyrics sung in Spalding’s three languages, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. It was jazz for the iPod age, and it rose quickly to No. 3 on the Billboard jazz chart, and stayed on the chart for sixty-two weeks. The freshness and excitement of her approach has led to her being called the “new hope for jazz.” Certainly, she arrives on the scene after a long period of conservatism and stagnation. Mentions Wynton Marsalis and the Young Lions movement. Spalding is passionate about trying to push the music into the future, to bring in fresh influences and voices, to prevent jazz from becoming merely a “museum piece.” (more)

Posted by John Colapinto

This week’s issue includes my Profile of the bassist, singer, and composer Esperanza Spalding. (Subscribers can read the full text online; others can pay to access the issue.) When I visited her home in Austin, Texas, I asked if I could shoot some video of her explaining how a song gets written and arranged. She happily obliged me by talking about the creation of an as-yet-untitled song: