Esperanza Spalding - On Your Wavelength

Interview: Mike Flynn

The annual awards season rarely brings its share of surprises with the Brits, Baftas, Golden Globes and Grammys invariably creating their own self-serving feedback loops. And yet last year bassist/singer Esperanza Spalding beat pop puppet Justin Bieber, folkies du jour Mumford & Sons and English rock diva Florence and the Machine to walk away with the Best New Artist Grammy award. Perhaps more surprisingly it was her esoteric classical-tinged jazz vocal set Chamber Music Society that proved the unlikely deal breaker for the Grammy judges and subsequently the wider listening public. Maybe it’s a sign of the times that in the current flaccid state of rock and pop that a jazz artist looks refreshingly alternative. And yet Spalding’s hybrid immediacy, between deep musicianship and instant audience appeal, is such that even without this ringing industry endorsement her wider popularity is already assured.

From this perspective the exuberant follow up to Chamber Music couldn’t be better timed, but this is no straight soul-pop sell out. An often intricate harmony-laden, groove-fuelled patchwork of songs Radio Music Society finds Spalding’s restless imagination stretching way beyond your average mono-chordal vamps as she swerves head-long into slinky counterpoint lines, zigzagging brass, voice, bass and drum parts on everything from Latino funk, big band swing, simmering balladry and gospel choruses. It seems for someone who’s spent hours learning how to sing her own exact transcriptions of Clifford Brown solos, while simultaneously playing the accompanying bass line, Radio Music is about as simple and straightforward as her song writing gets.

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