Grammy-Winning Musician Esperanza Spalding Tells Her Story

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And continuing on the artistic spectrum, our next guest is a force of nature in the jazz world. Esperanza Spalding is a bass player and a singer who rose to stardom when she became the first jazz performer to win a Grammy for Best New Artist. She learned the violin at the age of five, and went on to launch her career, which included teaching at Harvard. She explores how music heals the soul in her newest solo album “12 Little Spells,” and she spoke to our Walter Isaacson about how she is pushing the boundaries of jazz.

WALTER ISAACSON, PRESIDENT OF THE ASPEN INSTITUTE: Welcome to the show.

ESPERANZA SPALDING, BASS PLAYER AND SINGER: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: And you know, your music is such a rich hybrid of many different things. Tell me about your personal background growing up in Portland, and sort of the mix that made you.

SPALDING: Yes, wow. Well, I grew up in what we call in Northeast Portland. And —

ISAACSON: A rough neighborhood.

SPALDING: Yes, it was the roughest neighborhood you could find in Portland. Compared to some other cities, I think we had a milder version of rough. There were some nights of sleeping in bathtubs because of gun fire outside. But from my perspective, I didn’t really process like the danger, right? Because in the house, we were reading a lot and my mother was playing a lot of music. So I grew up surrounded by records and by the radio on a lot.

SPALDING: And starting from five, I was in music programming. So my life as I remember it was a lot of music playing and a lot of reading and a lot of talking with my mother about books and about sound, so it didn’t really, really register.

ISAACSON: And you came from a multi-ethnic background yourself. Has that affected your music? I mean, your father and your mother, tell me about them?

SPALDING: Well, my father is the average brother, you know, black man without a knowledge of our ancestry to the continent of Africa. Specifically, knowing what region our blood comes from that direction. But my mother is a mix of many European ancestries and some African- American ancestry and to answer your question, maybe growing up without an anchored sense of cultural identity, meaning it’s not — it’s not centered in an identifiable culture that I can point to and say, oh, yeah, I’m one of them. Oh, yes, I’m one of them. Maybe that has allowed me a sort of freedom or non-expectation when I move through the world to be associated or affiliated with a camp. I don’t feel beholden to any kind of musical genre or cultural center. I’m designing it as I go with whatever I find that I like, and that very much is my way through the world, culturally as well.

ISAACSON: And you picked up music around age five, so from your mother. Your mother was studying it a little bit, and suddenly you’re playing Beethoven. Is that right?

SPALDING: Yes, there were — Mendelssohn and Beethoven was in there and Mozart was in there. I mean, I heard Yo-yo Ma play the Bach Cello Suite.

ISAACSON: You heard Yo-yo Ma.

SPALDING: I heard Yo-yo Ma play in “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” and I can remember this sensation, like the total body activation of hearing that music, and I had never felt a sensation like that before. And I just remember going like, I have to do that. Whatever that — whatever is happening right there, I need to make that.

ISAACSON: And how old were you?

SPALDING: Five. And fortunately, there were a lot of music programs in Portland for children. So I dove into the Chamber Music Society of Oregon and they started us on this rigorous study and practice of classical music.

ISAACSON: And you started with the violin.

SPALDING: I started with the violin. It was it was too high. Now, I understand the frequency was just a little too high, and I skipped the cello which I was always wanting to play but they never had one of my size and I jumped straight to the bass.

ISAACSON: What attracted you — you play double bass mainly, right?

SPALDING: I do, yes.

ISAACSON: What attracted you to the bass?

SPALDING: Again sound, you know, a similar kind of reckoning when the tone affected my body. I mean, so much of the music that we consume now is through headphones. Maybe it’s easy to forget how powerful acoustic instruments are on the body. The physical experience of resonance is so profoundly moving and that is what activated my love for the instrument, and thank God because the instrument — a double bass was my way into improvisational music and into you know, my dance with jazz, which is sometimes very intimate and sometimes more of like, we’re doing our own thing in the club.

ISAACSON: You talked about seeing Yo-yo Ma on “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood,” playing it when you’re five. And now you teach at Harvard and so does Yo-yo Ma there, right? Do you deal with him? Did you tell him the story?

SPALDING: I told him the story. I’ve cried before him many times before Yo- yo Ma. Yes, and thinking about that initial exposure to music, I’m humbled and reminded that we really never know the impact that we’re having on people, right? So Fred Rogers, using that platform to open up that screen and fill it with everything he could imagine that could be meaningful and nourishing to young people, I hold that in my heart often. It’s just a reminder that as a performer, as an individual who has the privilege of being in public spaces often, you really never know what you’re activating. And I pray, I strive, I will — I’m working towards really becoming very mindful and intentional about what I bring in with me into those public spaces.

SPALDING: Because look at the power of that one show. I know so many people who were affected and babysat and inspired and reminded of their value and right to be in fulfilling and full experience as a young person, and thanks to that show. So I just — I have so much gratitude and respect for Fred Rogers and of course, for Yo-yo Ma.

ISAACSON: One of the great things about playing bass, is you get to sort of do a blues line. You could carry that. So how did that move you into jazz from classical?

SPALDING: Well, I didn’t know I was in classical, you know.

ISAACSON: You were playing Beethoven.

SPALDING: You know, when you’re in the water, it’s just the water, right? But when I picked up the instrument, and a teacher at the time, said, what you do is you mark the harmonic sound through time, and I realized that I was being given permission to play by ear, and in response, I was having a real time, which is what I was getting in trouble for in the classical pedagogy. I just knew — I knew that that was a home I have found. I don’t understand what that meant. But I knew that that was a home, improvised music. And as I started to hear the music, I knew they were talking to me. I knew there was some spiritual, personal experiential affinity in the sound that was emanating from these records in my heart and my spirit. And I say that my relationship to jazz, sometimes is intimate and sometimes it’s far away because it is such a commitment, and I don’t feel authorized to speak as a jazz musician if I’m not deeply in the practice, but I knew that — I knew it was going to be a part of my DNA musically forever, you know.

ISAACSON: You once sang and said that jazz ain’t nothing but soul. Explain that.

SPALDING: You can say, the same way that we strive to maintain a certain kind of spiritual hygiene. You know, you meditate, you go to church, you pray, you study. We strive to develop that spirit that we all are imbued with. I think jazz is similar. It’s a spirit. It’s an energy and it’s our responsibility as practitioners to steward it and to have good hygiene and good practice. To make sure that it’s moving through us at a high resonance that it is doing good when it comes out of our body or as we hold it in our body, and I very much feel that you can be a less technically proficient practitioner of the music and still bring forth the spirit that is, “jazz.” Which of course, is a word that was slapped on to a cultural phenomenon, and the pedagogy and a commitment and a practice. But since we’re using that word, yes, I’ll use that word right this moment.

ISAACSON: But when you won the Grammy for the Best New Artist, right, it was — this was the first time a jazz artist or somebody who was called a jazz artist on it.

SPALDING: Yes. Being in proximity with many practitioners of the music, who are such devotees and such profound practitioners of the craft, and have never had the kind of spotlight shine or opportunity that I’ve had because of factors like my youth, or the way that I look, or, you know, being perceived as sort of an anomaly within a field that at that time was primarily populated by European-American men, European men. I take that with a very big grain of salt, and I feel like I often want to add, like an addendum and say, yes, but actually, what I am is not really a jazz musician. I’m borrowing aspects from my study of it. But I pray to use whatever lights headed my way to shine it towards the practitioners that I know who are in the trenches really, really deeply in the practice and the community practice of what the music is. Because it’s never been popular music, you know. I mean, even Duke Ellington said, only five percent of the population will ever truly be invested in highly creative music, and that’s OK.

ISAACSON: One of the most amazing facts about your life was that even before you won your Grammy for Best New Artist, you get invited to be the performer, for the Nobel Prize ceremony with Barack Obama.

SPALDING: Yes.

ISAACSON: How did that happen?

SPALDING: I have no idea. Maybe somebody else wasn’t available.

ISAACSON: What was that like?

SPALDING: It was like, here we are on a big stage again, larger than just the stage, obviously. We’re playing for the King and Queen. OK. And for sort of our version of the King and Queen, you know. And essentially what’s going through a performance here, what was going through my body and my head is just let me bring the best just like anywhere, because the people in that room are of the same value of people in any room.

ISAACSON: They’re all Nobel Prize Laureate.

SPALDING: Well, and we’re all human beings, you know. I mean, I, I hope that in a club somewhere in God knows where with 35 people, we can bring through the same charge and offering musically. So honestly, the memory of different gigs don’t vary too, too, too much.

ISAACSON: What did you play for Obama’s Nobel Prize?

SPALDING: I played a song that I understood he liked, which was called “espera.” And that word means hope. It means the action of hoping, like you hope, “espera.” I hope — that you hope that happens, “espera.” An invitation to contemplate what we hope for and to allow sound to support the manifestation of those hopes into realities, we hope.

ISAACSON: You did an album, I think, a couple of years ago called “Exposure” but you did it I think in 77 straight hours and livestreamed you doing it.

SPALDING: Yes.

ISAACSON: What jolt of creativity did that give you to sort of be livestreaming you creating an album?

SPALDING: Well, I wanted the performance to be the act of creation. So we came in blank. We didn’t have anything written. It was a creation from zero to full album over the course of that livestreamed event. Because what I wanted to highlight was the actual process of making something from nothing which is the alchemy and magic of being an artist, right? So the jolt was what happens when the stakes are as high as they can possibly be and we’re invited into the performance of creation, and that’s what we did for 77 hours. I wanted to expose our creative process, expose what it actually looks like to be in that strange, nebulous, gooey, unknowing place where you’re capturing the seed of an idea and then building it into an entire entity, something that other people can engage with and we managed to make an album.

ISAACSON: Your latest is “12 Little Spells.”

SPALDING: Yes.

ISAACSON: And it came in, obviously 12 segments.

SPALDING: Yes.

ISAACSON: What were you trying to do with that? Is that breaking a new genre there, too?

SPALDING: Well, at present, it’s a speculative genre. But now, I am seeking to turn it into a genre which is, you could say like applied music therapy where we draw it elements from illusion work from music therapy from neuroscience, from sound therapy, light therapy, poetry therapy, movie therapy, and weave it with intention into songs that are intended to affect a very specific part of the body. So I think that now I’ve done my speculative artistic version, and the next step is to work with practitioners and actually ground it in the science and ground it in the field of therapy — music therapy, how sound can be intentionally applied to healing.

ISAACSON: Our society right now could use a lot of healing. How could music healing help?

SPALDING: Yes. Well, for starters, when we enter a space with strangers and have a shared experience, where our attention is directed, “externally” at a performance on stage. It’s been shown to create a sense of soothing in the body, and to increase our sense of connectivity with the people that we share this experience with. So just starting from there, experiencing live music with others, increases our felt sense of connectivity with other human beings. So you could start there as your foundation of the power of music to heal and keep exploring what you change on the stage and how it impacts and increases the healing potential for sharing art together — performed art together. Yes.

ISAACSON: Esperanza, thank you so much.

SPALDING: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: Appreciate it.

SPALDING: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.