A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
In a theater on Long Island, Esperanza Spalding is rehearsing with her band. She’s playing the bass, of course, accompanied by a drummer, guitarist and three backup singers. There’s a tour in the works, and a whole new album to learn how to play live.
“I've always depended on the interplay between the musicians to be the connecting point for the audience,” Spalding explains during a rehearsal break. “So, the overall experience of the sound that we're creating, combined with the dynamic interplay of improvised music, of jazz music — to me that's what they come for.”
Spalding grew up in Portland, Oregon. She took up the violin at age five, later switched to bass, and graduated from the Berklee School of Music at age 20. Berklee then hired her back, making her the youngest instructor on the faculty. Now, at 31, she’s a world-renowned composer, bassist and vocalist, has won several Grammys, performed at the White House, and shared the stage with greats such as Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder. Her next album is another artistic leap: she's turning “Emily’s D+ Evolution” into a theatrical production. That idea came about, she says, because of Emily.
Who is Emily? For Spalding, she's a kind of muse: a "being that asked to come out and play, that's how I feel it. And when I asked her what she wanted to do, she said, 'I want to move, and I want to talk about D+ Evolution.' And I didn't really know what that was, but it seemed like it was important.”
Emily is also Spalding's middle name, and the name she went by as a child. “She sort of represents creative inquisitiveness, and playfulness, and the willingness to try and explore and engage with whoever she encounters," Spalding says. "And that is something I hope we don't think is only for kids.”
Spalding says she envisioned the show as “these little vignettes happening … I was seeing this character, I was seeing the vignettes, I was seeing movement. So, since 2013, I've been looking for the people who could help me bring it there.”
One of the people she turned to is theater director Will Weigler, a long-time family friend whom Spalding met when he directed a show featuring her brother. Now, the two are collaborating for the first time.
“Originally she was asking for my advice,” Weigler recalls. “She'd worked on 'Emily's D+ Evolution,' she'd done the first iteration, and she was trying to find a way to dial it up, to make it much more of a theater production.”
Spalding flew to Weigler’s home in Victoria, B.C. to get his input. She remembers: “We sat down and we talked through all the songs, and I talked about what I wanted them to say, what to me it seemed like this was saying. He told me things that he saw that I hadn't seen. And we ended up basically working out this rough script.”
They started re-ordering the songs on the album to create a narrative arc. “There was a lot of shuffling,” Spalding says. “Once we found the order, it was just singing. It all seemed like it was written that way.”
The next step was to bring their ideas to rehearsal. The musicians and singers were enlisted as actors, and together they all set about to play with and refine the onstage moments that would capture the essence of each song. Finding those human connections, says Spalding, was a process of discovery.
“Equations are being solved by our subconscious creative mind,” she says. “And as we keep working at it, and digging away at that earth, and taking our brushes and trying to figure out how are we gonna get this bone out of the ground — the patterns have been revealing themselves.”
“Emily’s D+ Evolution” isn’t a musical, in the traditional sense, and it’s not exactly a straight concert either. It’s more like an illustrated song cycle. Spalding admits that turning music into theater is a new experience, outside of her comfort zone — even a little scary. But she takes inspiration from the words of one of her heroes, jazz musician Wayne Shorter, who urged her to "have the courage to engage in creative dialogue with the unexpected."
“I hear that phrase all the time, repeating in my head,” Spalding says. “And I think, Wow — that is the challenge! It’s one of the greatest challenges, as we step forward day-by-day, and try to creatively resolve and transform personal struggles — struggles with each other on the planet, sharing the planet's resources, reconciling heinous acts of violence, reconciling heinous acts of greed or expectation … All these attributes of the unexpected can often freeze us into not engaging. And it feels like the power we can draw on is creativity. It is the willingness to explore and to play — and try some new stuff, you know?”
As Emily reminds us, “trying new stuff” is more than child’s play — it’s an essential part of life.
Esperanza Spalding will perform “Emily’s D+ Evolution” on March 15 at The Belasco Theater.