esperanza spalding and Milton Nascimento interview: “The music for me is basically friendship, love, children, ocean, the life”

“Being around Milton is like being around a magical presence,” says bassist and singer esperanza spalding [sic] of the iconic Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento, 82, with whom she has released a new cross-generational studio album, Milton + esperanza on Concord Jazz. “There are archetypal energies in the Universe that express through music or song. Milton is one of those energies.”

The Portland, Oregon native, 40, fell under Nascimento’s spell as a scholarship student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, which she attended on an accelerated degree program that, on the recommendation of the college president, then saw her teaching music to undergraduates her own age. She was attending a dinner party with friends when the host put on Native Dancer, the 1975 collaborative album by Wayne Shorter featuring Nascimento, with Herbie Hancock playing keys, and was immediately entranced – and forever changed.

“Whenever I put it on, I’m awake,” the five-time Grammy-winning musician told Grammy.com in 2021. “It’s like coffee. I’m energised. I have to sing along. Maybe it’s oxygenating my brain because I’m breathing deep, I’m sighing, because I love the music so much.”

One of South America’s most venerated artists, Milton Silva Campos do Nascimento (or ‘Bituca’) has influenced many over the course of a six-decade, now 44-album career. “If God had a voice, it would be Milton’s,” the Brazilian MPB (Brazilian popular music) singer Elis Regina once famously declared of his celestial tenor. It’s a voice that has graced textured, often harmonically complex songs whose lyrics variously protest injustice, celebrate nature and champion love and racial harmony.

Many of his recordings are deemed masterpieces; among them, the milestone 1972 double album Clube da Esquina (‘Corner Club’) that Nascimento co-authored with 20-year-old singer/guitarist Lô Borges and titled after the collective of musicians that gathered in their birth state of Minas Gerais, in the shadow of Brazil’s murderous military regime. Its 21 tracks, sung in Portuguese (bar one in Spanish) spans a sprawl of sounds both ambitious and mysterious (“I have not managed to discover the rhythmic impulse he gives to his songs,” said the album’s string arranger Eumir Deodato). It remains a vital document of Brazilian music.

Nascimento folded his otherworldly voice – wordlessly shrieking here, shaking with pure vibrato there – and interracial, interplanetary aesthetic into influences including bossa nova, The Beatles, psychedelic rock, Afro-Brazilian music, Western classical music and the freeform spirituality of John Coltrane. Dissonance was embraced, as were grand orchestrations, marked tempo shifts and on ‘Cais’, a beach-set plea for hope that features on Milton + esperanza, haunting minor key motifs.

Milton + esperanza itself has drawn parallels with Clube da Esquina for its broad scope and collaborative aesthetic. Recorded in Brazil over several months in 2023, in the TV room at the Rio de Janeiro home Nascimento shares with his adopted son Augusto and two dogs named after John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the new albumfeatures guest appearances by Brazilian stars, including singer/songwriter Maria Gadú and finger-picking guitarist/composer Guinga.

Singer Lianne La Havas is here, as is UK woodwind hero Shabaka Hutchings, and spalding’s core band with the likes of guitarist Matthew Stevens and vocalist/synth player Corey D King. Nascimento’s longtime buddy Paul Simon sings in Portuguese on ‘Um Vento Passau’ (‘The Wind Has Passed’), a tune written especially for him by Nascimento, and Diane Reeves helps transform Michael Jackson’s climate shout-out ‘Earth Song’ into a work of spare, spine-tingling urgency. Singer Carolina Shorter, the widow of the late great Wayne Shorter, appears across a nine-minute reimagining of ‘When You Dream’, a song about love, life cycles and connections from her husband’s 1989 release Atlantis.

“Another thing Milton and I have in common is this love and friendship with Wayne,” says spalding of the American saxophonist and composer, who died in March 2023, and with whom she collaborated on two genre-less, Greek myth-fuelled performance pieces, Gaia and Iphigenia (which premiered as an opera in 2021). Nascimento has named an amphitheatre in his garden after Wayne Shorter.

“Carolina said that one of the last things Wayne said to her was, ‘Carolina, you need to sing, and people need to hear you’. She said it was if Wayne’s spirit was involved in getting her involved in the recording. And everything came together.

“It wasn’t meant to be nine minutes long,” she adds. “That’s just what happened.”

Of the 16 tracks on Milton + esperanza, around a third are compositions from Nascimento’s back catalogue. 'Outobro’ (‘October’), the album’s first single, groovier than the Hancock-led original.

“That arrangement was perfect so redoing it was a struggle,” Nascimento tells Jazzwise, “but at the last moment came this other arrangement, very unplanned, very magical.” Nascimento’s voice is richer, deeper, more battleworn than of yore, his years of experience shining, gold-like, through the occasional crack. But when joined by spalding on the duet performances that make up half the list, it’s a forceful instrument utterly complemented by the American’s airy, Joni Mitchell-like falsetto: “Joni Mitchell has totally influenced my singing style, and I embrace it,” she’s said.

Arrangements for the most part are impressionistic and spacious (spalding produced, arranged and executive produced the whole thing). She says she wrote her four originals with Nascimento in mind, and sings these with a Brazilian-style lead, sliding artfully behind the beat, along the bottom of notes. The gorgeous ‘Wings for the Thought Bird’ finds her mimicking bird calls, as Elena Pinderhughes plays flute, Caroline Shorter chants a Buddhist prayer and the 20-strong Orquestra Ouro Preto send their strings soaring.

Still a huge Beatles fan (he has recorded a sophisticated ballad version of ‘Hello, Goodbye’ and composed his own tribute, ‘Para Lennon e McCartney’), Nascimento interprets Sgt Pepper’s ‘A Day in the Life’ in a playful, jazzy unison duet with his new musical partner.

“In the studio we figured out the key and just started doing it. We were like ‘Let’s just yell it’. It had to sound messy,” says spalding, who has also said she remembers “Wayne talking about when you play, you should be having fun.”

You can hear the joy and friendship in the snatches of found-sound chatter that features in the album’s short interludes. On ‘outra planeta’ (‘Another Planet’) there’s laughter, and breezy philosophy.

“The music for me is basically friendship, love, children, ocean, the life,” says Nascimento, sage-like in his winter years. The icon was nearing the end of his 2021 ‘Last Session’ tour - which took in the UK and Europe and a series of emotional farewell concerts at home –that Augusto Nascimento contacted spalding and asked her to create a final record with his father.

“He told me, ‘It should be you and him, Milton and esperanza, produced by you, but you need to do it now while his voice is warmed up from his tour,’” she has said.

spalding loves to work with elders she admires. Soon after graduating from Berklee, aided by the critical and commercial success of her 2006 debut Junjo but especially its 2008 follow-up Esperanza, she won ongoing engagements with the A-list likes of tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, bassist Charlie Hayden, violinist Regina Carter and vibraphonist Gary Burton (later, she’d set aside the bass to sing in a run of lively duo shows at the Village Vanguard with pianist and composer Fred Hersch). But it was 2010’s Chamber Music Society (titled for the Oregon community orchestra in which she played self-taught violin as a five-year-old) that expanded her style and, with guest vocal appearances from Gretchen Parlato and indeed, Milton Nascimento, her horizons (it also won her a Grammy for Best New Artist).

It was Herbie Hancock, ever encouraging of rising stars [see this month’s Taking Off feature on Jahari Stampley, p22], who had raved about Spalding’s work to Nascimento, thus encouraging the Brazilian to accept an invitation to duet on the Chamber Music Society track ‘Apple Blossom’.

“One of my first instruments was the bass, and I used to sing and play [in a jazz trio as a teenager],” says Nascimento. “Then I saw a person doing the same thing, beautifully, and then it was a clash of souls. This younger generation [of musicians] saves lives because they are doing the most beautiful thing they can by putting their hearts forward, playing and singing. It’s the sound of the world.”

The two musicians, younger and elder, had shared the stage at the 2011 Rock in Rio Festival, after which Spalding made a habit of visiting Nascimento whenever she is in Brazil. Their friendship was helped, probably, by the fact that Spalding isn’t just a musical boundary-pusher but a philanthropist, activist, environmentalist and seeker. Her romantic, thought-provoking, sometimes didactic eighth studio album, 2021’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, examined the therapeutic power of music alongside a host of like-minded musicians and researchers. Her single ‘Não Ao Marco Temporal’, released by Concord in February 2024, stands as a protest anthem against the Temporal Framework initiative that threatened Indigenous land rights, and a reminder of fragile victories and ongoing struggles.

Nascimento, too, is a staunch environmentalist, land rights advocate and political left-leaner. Who, having weathered the tyranny of the military dictatorship in Brazil through 1964 until 1985 – his 1973 album Milagro dos Peixes features only wordless vocalese after his lyrics were veto-ed, while his small role in Werner Herzog’s 1982 Amazon jungle-set film epic Fitzcarraldo made him a champion of Indigenous communities - refuses to ever utter the name of far-right leader and climate criminal Jair Bolsonaro.

“I hope that young people don’t get caught up in this dictator business because they don’t understand what it was like,” Nascimento has said. It is a palpably precious friendship, this meeting of kindred spirits, this clashing of souls, and one which has flourished through mutual respect. Asked how it feels to be working with such an elder, with some the greatest long-established names in music, Spalding says that the privilege is hers, that working intergenerationally is like being continually guided, shown the way.

“A friend of mine in Portland who’s in his 70s once remarked that while everyone thinks the younger generation is the future, that phrase should actually be applied to the previous generation because they give the younger generation the possibility and space and daring to be able to go forward,” she says. “So, to me, [working with Nascimento] is like getting close to the future, being in touch with these portals. Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento ...”

She lists several Brazilian music legends: “The possibilities they opened!”

For his part, Nascimento is delighted to have worked his magical energy on Milton + esperanza, an album that is winning the sort of accolades that Clube de Esquina continues to garner. While he and Spalding had wanted to work together for several years, finally all the elements dovetailed. It was right place, right time. And so much happiness.

“Valeu a pena,” he says. “It was worth the wait."