And above all else, the 41-year-old artist kept coming back to the idea of joy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She repeatedly referred to music as a \u201ctechnology,\u201d a medium through which joy can be found and expressed. For spalding (who stylizes her name in lowercase), sharing that joy is never more important than when she \u2014 or the whole world \u2014 feels overwhelmed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhat we do with that cacophony, that overwhelm of input, is we make creative sense,\u201d she said. \u201cWe make creative logic, we make play, we make joy, we make purpose. That is what the homo sapien does with the information that we\u2019re receiving from our environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raised by a single mother in a working-class neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, spalding taught herself violin as a child after seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform on\u00a0Mister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood. Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello, but the cello was too heavy for spalding, who was then four years old. So violin it was.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At 20, she became one of the youngest instructors in the history of the Berklee College of Music, her alma mater. Since then, her career has evolved in ways that have consistently resisted categorization. In comparing her to Joni Mitchell, Bj\u00f6rk and Prince, Rolling Stone called her a \u201cgenre-of-one<\/a>\u201d artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n Early albums like her debut,\u00a0Junjo,\u00a0and her sophomore effort,\u00a0Esperanza,\u00a0established her as a virtuosic player and composer steeped in jazz tradition. She was blending jazz improvisation with chamber arrangements and Brazilian influences. (spalding often sings in Portuguese, and she describes herself as a eaabibacliitoti artist: an acronym that stands for \u201cEuropean-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n Then came the moment that changed her public profile forever: the 2011 Grammy Awards, where she unexpectedly defeated Justin Bieber, Drake, Florence and the Machine and Mumford & Sons to win Best New Artist \u2014 becoming the first (and so far only) jazz musician to claim the award. After that win, spalding became even more adventurous.\u00a0<\/p>\n Her album Emily\u2019s D+Evolution embraced art-rock theatricality and alter egos. Next up, her album Exposure was written, arranged and recorded on a 77-hour Facebook livestream. In recent years, her work has expanded even further into opera, dance, teaching and therapeutic arts research. But she\u2019s still a jazz artist at heart.<\/p>\n She collaborated extensively with Wyne Shorter during the later years of the saxophonist\u2019s life, eventually co-producing and writing the libretto for his opera \u201c\u2026(Iphigenia).\u201d In many ways, Shorter embodied the experimental spirit that seems to define much of spalding\u2019s recent work \u2014 she speaks about the musicians who came before her with almost devotional awe.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m listening to them, I\u2019m thinking about them, I\u2019m giving thanks to them,\u201d she told us. \u201cI\u2019m just humbled and inspired by what they were able to craft for themselves as life, like a lifestyle and artistic discipline and community and industry under incredibly challenging, intentionally destructive circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n Further, she described these jazz artists who came before her as architects who left \u201cclarity of mapping and blueprinting\u201d behind for future generations. That same admiration runs through her relationship with Milton Nascimento, an 83-year-old singer, songwriter, guitarist, and pianist from Brazil. Nascimento\u2019s work has long blurred the boundaries between jazz, folk, spiritual music and political expression, and in 2024, he and spalding released the album Milton + Esperanza. Reviews were effusive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Spalding with acclaimed Brazilian artist Milton Nascimento, whom she collaborated with on 2024\u2019s Milton + Esperanza.<\/p>\n