Bassist Esperanza Spalding burst into the musical forefront two years ago with her self-titled album that flew to Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Chart and stayed there for more than 70 weeks. In the interim, she has starred at concerts as solo artist and ensemble member, appeared on major television shows and at the White House, and performed in Oslo at both the Nobel Prize ceremony and the concert afterward.
“It was an experience that will stay with me,” she said. “When I looked out from City Hall and saw how diverse the audience was, I thought, Wow! This is a significant event for our country and therefore I’m a part of that history.”
A graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she is the youngest member of the faculty, Spalding played with orchestras in and around Portland after obtaining a GED at age 16. Because many of her early experiences focused on chamber music, it is no surprise that she revisits that genre in her latest album, “Chamber Music Society.”
Her return to Washington this week starts Lincoln Theatre’s season with a program of music from that album. Not a typical chamber music experience, this venture showcases her artistry on the string bass, vocal prowess and her creative compositions and arrangements backed by some of the most respected instrumentalists in the business.
“The whole idea evolved from my diverse repertoire,” she said. “While looking at songs I’ve written over a long period of time, I discovered patterns that would fit together and be perfect as chamber works. The recording begins with ‘Little Fly’ based on a poem by William Blake that I met 10 years ago in a bookstore with a collection of poems and paintings. It shows almost a childlike wonder of the natural world and is such a perfect introspective of life that I’ve had it hanging above my desk since then. While looking at it closely, I began noodling around and composed a melody that complemented its perspective. Then I added a string arrangement.”
The pattern continues with “Apple Blossoms,” based on a poem she wrote to express a melancholy fragment of melody that popped into her mind. In time, the rest of the melody materialized, but she still had no lyrics. What would the story be?
“I wanted to speak to the regenerative aspect of death and the experience of a great loss in a cyclical context,” she said. “The story I wrote is about a man going to the grave of his wife when the apple blossoms return and telling her about the winter in his heart. Spring rises up after the death of winter.”
“Winter Sun,” another piece based on one of her original poems, is as playful and jazzy as are her lyrics that propel sounds like “crunch” to the fore along with visual images of autumn leaves turning to brown and orange confetti. She credits her mother with nurturing her creative writing talents and teaching her to “show, don’t tell.”
Her scat vocal in “Knowledge of Good and Evil” and her tango-infused arrangement of “Wild is the Wind” by film composer Dimitri Tiomkin illustrate chamber music surging beyond expected boundaries. The final number, “Short and Sweet,” is exactly that, but it ends on a question, hinting of much more to come. Indeed, Spalding is already at work on Radio Music Society, her jazzy challenge to the format of the top 40 radio artists.
“I want my audience to learn that you have to let go when listening to chamber music, enter into it with quiet faith, and lighten your hold on it,” she said. “It’s like when reading one word at the end of a sentence leads you to something else. There’s such diverse feedback at a single concert that responses can range from simple and complicated to joyously emotional and sad.”
