[Dixielandjazz] Excerpts from an Esperanza Spalding interview.

[Stephen G Barbone]

Below are excerpts from an interview with Esperanza Spalding.  
Interesting to see her viewpoints about how crossover music focused  
upon young audiences might draw more audience to jazz. Note especially  
the below comment:

"“I always say that the problem with jazz accessibility is not the  
content of the music, it’s people’s ability to access it,” Ms.  
Spalding said. “Meaning, if you don’t already listen to it or go to  
concerts, how would you even hear jazz music?”

How indeed? Especially in the USA give the note in the March Issue of  
American Rag that we've lost 20 OKOM jazz festivals here in the past  
few years.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.conm/barbonestreetjazzband

The Rookie Of the Year, One Year Wiser

NY Times - By Nate Chinen - March 178, 2012

ONE year later there was no jaw-dropping upset, no demure acceptance  
speech, no fresh affront to Justin Bieber’s watchful fan cabal. This  
time around Esperanza Spalding caused less of a stir at the Grammy  
Awards, where she’d prevailed as best new artist in 2011, shocking a  
field that included Mr. Bieber and another platinum-selling megastar,  
the rapper-crooner Drake.

Not to imply that Ms. Spalding, an irrepressible young bassist and  
singer with a foundation in jazz, took it easy at this year’s Grammys.  
She played a concert with high school musicians, did red carpet  
interviews and presented in the classical category. But you wouldn’t  
have seen her on the network broadcast — for that you’d have to wait a  
couple of weeks for, strangely enough, the Oscars — and the lower  
profile suited her just fine.

The day before flying to Los Angeles for her Grammy week duties last  
month, she practically batted away a question about the impact of the  
best new artist award on her life and career.

“More attention,” was her unusually succinct reply, though she  
immediately fleshed it out with a metaphor. “Before the Grammy last  
year I used to say it’s like being a worker ant, going back and forth  
to get the food, and all of a sudden someone’s watching you and  
following you along. . . . But now I see that the spotlight can  
actually directly serve the music.”

That conviction courses through “Radio Music Society,” her fourth  
album, due out on Tuesday. A collection of groove-based songs, almost  
all originals, it’s Ms. Spalding’s version of a crossover pop album.  
At the same time its credits include dozens of her fellow jazz  
musicians. Bringing them on board meant a lot to Ms. Spalding, who has  
clung to her worker-ant affinities even as public perception, and her  
own fresh-faced ambitions, conspired to anoint her queen of the  
colony. She’d already reached a lower tier of celebrity before her  
Grammy, turning up in Vogue, Banana Republic ads and settings as  
rarified as the White House. Her utopian urge to share the spotlight  
sits a bit uneasily against the very singular nature of her stardom,  
in which she’s naturally complicit.

Ms. Spalding, 27, has a petite frame, delicate features and a  
silhouette usually distinguished by the dandelion bloom of her Afro.  
Her ebullient personality matches that of a perpetual overachiever.  
During a lunch interview in Greenwich Village she answered most  
questions in discursive bursts, quick with her cadences and  
opinions. . . .  A week earlier she’d been at Unesco headquarters in  
Paris, playing a concert with the pianist Herbie Hancock; a song she’d  
composed for the occasion was performed by Corinne Bailey Rae. . . .

But it was musicianship, rather than novelty, that got her up and  
running. “From the first tune we played together, she had a beautiful,  
flowing feel, and brought a real melodic approach to the bass part,”  
said the saxophonist Joe Lovano, who taught Ms. Spalding in a combo  
class at the Berklee College of Music, and soon took her on tour. Mr.  
Lovano later formed Us Five, with Ms. Spalding strictly on bass,  
alongside a pianist and two drummers; the band had a nominated album  
at this year’s Grammys. . . .

When the jazz magazine DownBeat decided to run a cover article on  
“Radio Music Society,” she suggested that the photo shoot also include  
Mr. Lovano, Ms. Carrington and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, who all  
appear on the album.

“One thing that irks me a little bit is this idea that people paying  
attention to you is good for everybody,” she said. “But it’s such a  
focused beam of light that that’s not realistic. Unless you  
intentionally go, like, ‘I’m with him!’ ” She crooked one arm as if to  
pull in the person next to her. “So the idea of this society is: yeah,  
we are making this music. And it really takes a ‘we’ to make this kind  
of music.” . . .

“There is an assumption that if you’re young and pretty, you will get  
all these opportunities that are way beyond your musical foundation,”  
she said.

By the time she released “Chamber Music Society,” an art-song project  
characterized by interior, acoustic arrangements, she was the rare  
jazz artist with mainstream cachet. The Grammy amplified everything,  
not least her sales: according to Nielsen SoundScan her first two  
Heads Up releases have each sold nearly 120,000 copies, a phenomenal  
figure for jazz.

“I always say that the problem with jazz accessibility is not the  
content of the music, it’s people’s ability to access it,” Ms.  
Spalding said. “Meaning, if you don’t already listen to it or go to  
concerts, how would you even hear jazz music?”

She conceived of “Radio Music Society” as the extroverted, electric  
flip side of “Chamber Music Society,” originally with the intention of  
making songs that could get airplay. (At one point the rapper Q-Tip  
was said to be producing the album, but he ended up with an associate  
credit, behind Ms. Spalding herself.) But as she got deeper into the  
process, she realized she didn’t want to excise solos just to suit the  
constraints of a radio format.

While “Radio Music Society” is crowded with several generations of  
jazz musicians — including her old mentor from Portland, the trumpeter  
Thara Memory, along with his students — she’s front and center at  
every turn. Which is partly a matter of style: “Radio Music Society”  
reaches most for the gleam of aspirational pop in the Stevie Wonder  
vein. (One of its two covers is Mr. Wonder’s “I Can’t Help It.”)

Befitting that lineage the album mingles love songs with social  
commentary. Its lead single, “Black Gold,” is an exhortation aimed at  
African-American boys, calling up a cultural legacy that predates  
slavery. The Wayne Shorter fusion anthem “Endangered Species” comes  
with new lyrics framing an environmental parable. “Land of the Free”  
reflects on the exoneration of a Texas man, Cornelius Dupree Jr.,  
after 30 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 13 civilians dead.”

These songs raise questions but don’t exactly point fingers, a  
distinction Ms. Spalding drew at lunch, hours before attending a  
reading at a scruffy downtown gallery by the firebrand poet Amiri  
Baraka in tribute to his fallen comrade Gil Scott-Heron. She listened  
raptly as Mr. Baraka read, backed by the jazz pianist Steve Colson. On  
her way out she bought a couple of Mr. Baraka’s books, including  
“Somebody Blew Up America.” Later she said, about her new songs: “I  
don’t think I’m taking a stand. I’m inviting a listener into a  
dialogue.” The difference between those two actions seemed as clear to  
her as the difference between a lead vocal and the interplay of a  
band. . . .