Grammy Award-Winner Esperanza Spalding is Pushing the Boundaries of Music | Amanpour and Company

Esperanza Spalding is a bass player and a singer who rose to stardom when she became the first jazz performer to win a Grammy for Best New Artist she learned the violin at the age of five and went on to launch her career which included teaching at Harvard she explores how music heals the soul in her newest solo album 12 little spells and she spoke to our Walter Isaacson about how she's pushing the boundaries of jazz welcome to the show thank you thank you for having and you know your music is such a rich hybrid of many different things tell me about your personal background growing up in Portland and sort of the mix that made you yeah Wow well I grew up in what we call in a northeast Portland and a rough neighborhood yeah this was the roughest neighborhood you could find in Portland compared to some other cities I think we had a milder version of rough there were some nights of sleeping in bathtubs because of gun fire outside but from my perspective I didn't really process like the danger right because in the house we were reading a lot and my mother was playing a lot of music so I I grew up surrounded by records and by the radio on a lot and starting from five I was a music programming so my life as I remember it was a lot of music playing and a lot of reading and a lot of talking with my mother about books and about sound so it didn't really really register and you came from a multi ethnic background yourself has that affected your music I mean your father and your mother tell me about them well my father is a average brother you know black man without knowledge of our ancestry to the continent of Africa specifically knowing where what region our blood comes from in that direction but my mother is a mix of many European ancestries and some african-american ancestry and to answer your question maybe growing up without an anchored sense of cultural identity meaning it's not it's not centered in an identifiable culture that I could point to incident oh yeah I'm one of them oh yes I'm one of them maybe that has allowed me a sort of freedom or non expectation when I move through the world to be associated or affiliated with a camp I don't feel beholden to any kind of musical genre or cultural center I'm designing it as I go with whatever I find that I like and that very much is my way through the world culturally as well and you picked up music around age five your mother your mother was studying in a little bit and suddenly you're playing Beethoven is that right um yes there were Mendelssohn and Beethoven was in there and Mozart was in there I mean I I heard you know my play Bach cello suite you heard yo-yo ma am i playing mister Ida's neighborhood and I I can remember the sensation like the total body activation of hearing that music and I never felt a sensation like that before and I just remember going like I have to do that whatever that whatever is happening right there i I need to open in five and fortunately there were a lot of music programs in Portland for children so I dove into the Chamber Music Society of Oregon and they started us on this rigorous study and practice of classical music and you started with the violin with the violin it was it was too high now I understand the frequency was just a little too high and I skipped the cello which I was always wanting to play but they never had one of my size and I jump straight to the bass what attractive you play double bass right detracted you do the legs against sound a similar kind of reckoning when the tone affected my body I mean so much of the music that we consume now is through headphones maybe it's easy to forget how powerful acoustic instruments are on my body the the physical experience of resonance is so profoundly moving and that is what activated my love for the instrument and thank God because the instrument a double bass was my way into improvisational music and into you know my dance with jazz which is sometimes very intimate and sometimes more of like a we're doing our own thing in the club you talk about seeing yo-yo ma on Mister Rogers neighborhood playing it when you're five and now you teach at Harvard and tells yo-yo ma there right do you do you deal with him did you tell him the story I told him the story I've cried before him many times before yo-yo ma ya thinking about that initial exposure to music I'm humbled and reminded that we really never know the impact that we're having on people right so Fred Rogers using that platform to open up that screen and fill it with everything you could imagine that could be meaningful and nourishing to young people I hold that in my heart often it's just a reminder that as a performer as a individual who has the privilege of being in public spaces often you really never know what you're activating and I I pray I strive I will can I'm working towards really becoming very mindful and intentional about what what I bring in with me into those public spaces because look at the power of that one show I know so many people who were affected and babysat and inspired and reminded of their value and right to be in full feeling in full experience of the young person thanks for that show so I just I have so much gratitude and respect for for Fred Rogers and of course for your yo ma one of the great things about playing bass yes as you get to sort of do a blues line Oh carry that okay so how did that move you into jazz from classical well I didn't know I was in classical you know we were playing Beethoven you know the in the water it's just the water rate but when I picked up the instrument and my music teacher at the time said what you do is you mark the harmonic sound through time mm-hm and I realized that I was being given permission to play by ear and in response what was happening in real time which is what I was getting in trouble for in the classical pedagogy I just knew I knew that that was a home I had found I didn't understand what that meant but I knew that that was at home improvised music and and as I started to hear the music I knew they were talking to me I knew there was some spiritual personal experience or affinity in the sound that was emanating from these records and my heart and my spirit and I say that my relationship to jazz sometimes it's intermittent sometimes it's far away because it is such a commitment and I don't feel authorized to speak as a jazz musician if I'm not deeply in the practice but but I knew that I knew it was gonna be a part of my DNA musically forever you know you once sang and said that jazz ain't nothing but soul hmm explain that hmm you could say the same way that we strive to maintain a certain kind of spiritual hygiene you know you meditate or you go to church or you pray or you study we strive to develop that spirit that we all are imbued with I think jazz is similar it's period it's an energy and it's our responsibility as practitioners to steward it and to have good hygiene and good practice to make sure that it's moving through us at a high resonance that it's doing good when it comes out of our body or as we hold it in our body and I very much feel that you can be a less technically proficient practitioner of the music and still bring forth the spirit that is jazz which of course is a word that was slapped on to a cultural phenomenon and a pedagogy and a commitment and a practice but since we're using that word yes but when you won the Grammy for the Best New Artist right it was as there's the first time a jazz artist or somebody who was called a jazz artist on it yeah being in proximity with many practitioners of the music who are such devotees and such profound practitioners of the craft and have never had the kind of spotlight shine or opportunity that I've had because of factors like my youth or the way that I look or you know being perceived as sort of an anomaly within a field that at that time was primarily populated by European American men European men I take that with a very big grain of salt and I feel like I often want to add like an addendum and say yeah but actually what what I am is not really a jazz musician I'm I'm borrowing aspects from my study of it but I pray to use whatever lights headed my way to shine it towards the practitioners that I know are in the trenches really really deeply in the practice and the community practice of what the music is because it's never been popular music you know I mean even Duke Ellington said only 5% of the population will ever truly be invested in highly creative music and that's okay one of the most amazing facts about your life that even before you won your Grammy for Best New Artist you get invited to be the performer for know before the Nobel Prize ceremony with Barack Obama Wow how does that I have no idea maybe somebody else wasn't available well I almost gave up holding on [Music] who's that like it was like here we are on a big stage again larger than just the stage obviously we're playing for the king and queen okay and for sort of our version of the king and queen you know and essentially what's going through a performance head what was going through my body in my head is just let me bring the best just like anywhere because the people in that room have the same value of people in any room it's all Nobel Prize laureate well and all human beings you know I mean I I hope that in a club somewhere in God knows where with 35 people we can bring through the same charge and offering musically so honestly the the memory of of different gigs don't vary tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu much what did you play the song that I I understood he liked which was called aspetta and that word means hope it means the action of hoping like you hope I Spit uh I hope that don't you hope that happens it's better yeah an invitation to contemplate what we hope for and to allow sound to support the manifestation of those hopes into realities we hope you did an album in I think a couple of years ago a called exposure and what you did it I think in 77 straight hours and live streamed yes you're doing it what jolt of creativity did that give you to sort of be live streaming you creating an album well I wanted the the performance to be the act of creation so we came in blank we didn't have anything written it was it was a creation from zero to full album over the course of that live stream of it because what I wanted to highlight was the actual process of making something from nothing which is the alchemy and magic of being an artist I hate when the first time you've got a certain way about your dog so the jolt was what happens when the stakes are as high as they can possibly be and we're invited into the performance of creation and that's what we did for 77 hours I wanted to to expose our creative process expose what it actually looks like to be in that strange nebulous gooey unknowing place where you're capturing the seed of an idea and then building it into a entire entity something that other people can engage with and we managed to make an album your latest is 12 little spells yeah they came in obviously 12 segments yeah different parts of your body so yes what were you trying to do with that is that breaking a new genre there - mmm well at present it's it's a speculative genre but now I'm seeking to turn it into a genre which is you could say like applied music therapy well we draw in elements from illusion work from music therapy from neuroscience from sound therapy light therapy poetry therapy movement therapy and weave it with intention into songs that are intended to effect a very specific part of the body [Music] so I think that now I've done my speculative artistic version and the next step is to work with practitioners and actually grounded in the science and grounded in the field of therapy music therapy how sound can be intentionally applied to healing our society right now could use a lot of healing how could music healing help yeah well for starters when we enter a space with strangers and have a shared experience where our attention is directed quote/unquote externally at a performance on stage it's been shown to create a sense of soothing in the body and to increase our sense of connectivity with the people that we shared this experience with so just starting from they're experiencing loud music with others increases our felt sense of connectivity with other human beings so you could start there as your foundation of the power of music to heal and keep exploring what you change on the stage and how it impacts and increases the healing potential for sharing art together performed art together yeah that's right thank you so thank you [Music] you

Channel: Amanpour and Company

Views: 67,822

Keywords: Esperanza Spalding, Walter Isaacson, Grammy Awards, Grammys, Best New Artist, jazz, Harvard, Harvard University, 12 Little Spells, violin, bass, Chamber Music Society of Oregon, musician, life force, Yo-Yo Ma, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, double bass, Portland, Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, Berklee College of Music, jazz musician, Esperanza

Id: 6MAyDFhLDvo

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020