Esperanza Spalding: The Rookie of the Year, One Year Wiser

[Miguel]

Berklee '05, the first jazz musician to capture the Best New Artist Grammy

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.” She held up an imaginary magnifying glass. “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. And while she allowed that the last year has involved “a lot of blah-blah-blahing about myself” — even her term for an interview carries the alliterative punch of scat singing — she shrugged off the notion that greater fame meant more distractions. 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.

...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.”

...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?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/arts/m...ted=1&_r=1