Esperanza Spalding: Hope and Jazz
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
Wanted to open up the first Tuesday’s Chile diary in DK4 with a celebration of music and can’t think of a better way to do it than with the music of Esperanza Spalding (her name means “hope” in Spanish), recipient of the Grammy Award for Best New Artist .
Spalding, bassist and vocalist is not new to jazz, and though she is young, she has been playing professionally since she was a child.
Her bio on her web page at the Chamber music society tells part of her story:
Spalding was born in 1984 and raised on what she calls “the other side of the tracks” in a multi-lingual household and neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Growing up in a single-parent home amid economically adverse circumstances, she learned early lessons in the meaning of perseverance and moral character from the role model whom she holds in the highest regard to this day – her mother. But even with a rock-solid role model, school did not come easy to Spalding, although not for any lack of intellectual acumen. She was both blessed and cursed with a highly intuitive learning style that often put her at odds with the traditional education system. On top of that, she was shut in by a lengthy illness as a child, and as a result, was home-schooled for a significant portion of her elementary school years. In the end, she never quite adjusted to learning by rote in the conventional school setting. “It was just hard for me to fit into a setting where I was expected to sit in a room and swallow everything that was being fed to me,” she recalls. “Once I figured out what it was like to be home-schooled and basically self-taught, I couldn’t fit back into the traditional environment.”
However, the one pursuit that made sense to Spalding from a very early age was music. At age four, after watching classical cellist Yo Yo Ma perform on an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the roadmap was suddenly very clear. “That was when I realized that I wanted to do something musical,” she says. “It was definitely the thing that hipped me to the whole idea of music as a creative pursuit.”Within a year, she had essentially taught herself to play the violin well enough to land a spot in The Chamber Music Society of Oregon, a community orchestra that was open to both children and adult musicians. She stayed with the group for ten years, and by age 15, she had been elevated to a concertmaster position.
But life had more in store for the young violinist, and she switched instruments – one that is rarely selected by young women to attempt to master.
…she had also discovered the bass, and all of the non-classical avenues that the instrument could open for her. Suddenly, playing classical music in a community orchestra wasn’t enough for this young teenager anymore. Before long she was playing blues, funk, hip-hop and a variety of other styles on the local club circuit. “The funny thing was, I was the songwriter, but I had never experienced love before. Being the lyricist and the lead singer, I was making up songs about red wagons, toys and other childish interests. No one knew what I was singing about, but they liked the sound of it and they just ate it up.” At 16, Spalding left high school for good. Armed with her GED and aided by a generous scholarship, she enrolled in the music program at Portland State University. “I was definitely the youngest bass player in the program,” she says. “I was 16, and I had been playing the bass for about a year and a half. Most of the cats in the program had already had at least eight years of training under their belts, and I was trying to play in these orchestras and do these Bach cello suites. It wasn’t really flying, but if nothing else, my teachers were saying, ‘Okay, she does have talent.’”
Berklee College of Music was the place where the pieces all came together and doors started opening. After a move to the opposite coast and three years of accelerated study, she not only earned a B.M., but also signed on as an instructor in 2005 at the age of 20 – an appointment that has made her the youngest faculty member in the history of the college. She was the 2005 recipient of the prestigious Boston Jazz Society scholarship for outstanding musicianship. In addition to the studying and the teaching, Spalding’s years at Berklee also created a host of networking opportunities with several notable artists, including pianist Michel Camilo, vibraphonist Dave Samuels, bassist Stanley Clarke, guitarist Pat Metheny, singer Patti Austin, and saxophonists Donald Harrison and Joe Lovano. “Working with Joe was terrifying,” she recalls, “but he’s a really generous person. I don’t know if I was ready for the gig or not, but he had a lot of faith in me. It was an amazing learning experience.”
Spalding has talked about her own musical icons and journeys and they include Patti LaBelle, Ornette Coleman and Stevie Wonder.
She has played twice at the White House, one of those events was honoring Stevie Wonder
where she performed his 1985 hit Overjoyed.
Stevie, we all know is a musical genius – composer, artist, arranger, musician. Interestingly some critics who are familiar with Milton Nascimento have called him Brazil’s Stevie Wonder.
Spalding’s musical portfolio and facility with language has led her to drink deeply from the well of the music of Brazil. Brazilians, familiar with her renditions of their music have applauded both her enunciation and homage to their classics. And so she leads us to the music of Milton Nascimento.
Nascimento’s music is a rich pastiche of afro-amazonian sound, and instrumentation- a blend of jazz, r&b, samba and European influences with lush orchestrations combined to perfection with his soaring vocals.
When I lived in DC in the early seventies and worked at radio station WPFW we were the first radio station to devote substantial airtime to Brazilian music, on a show “Berimbau” and as a result local record stores began to get demands for artists of the diaspora – ultimately having a “Milton Nascimento section" (when his music was on import labels). Jazz fans, already familiar with Wayne Shorter, from his days with Art Blakey and Miles Davis, as well as his own jazz fusion group Weather Report were introduced to Milton by Shorter. Shorter, whose wife Ana Maria was Brazilian, highlighted Milton’s music and voice on his groundbreaking Native Dancer album in 1974:
Native Dancer is the fifteenth album by Wayne Shorter. It is a collaboration with Brazilian musician Milton Nascimento, featuring some of his most acclaimed compositions, including "Ponta de Areia" and "Miracle of The Fishes". It is notable for including jazz rock and funk elements in addition to regional rhythms and Brazilian influence, in an attempt to create a "world" music accessible from many perspectives. Many American musicians were influenced by this album, including Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, who covered "Ponta de Areia" on their hit 1977 album All 'N All.
Ponta De Areia
Also on that album was "Ana Maria" dedicated to Shorter’s wife, who was to die tragically in airplane crash in 1996 on TWA Flight 800 along with her niece Dalila, daughter of Caribbean jazz vocalist Jon Lucien.
Lucien, would later dedicate an album to his daughter, which included a re-release of one of my favorite Lucien ballads “Rashida” which picked up a Grammy nomination:
Here is Spalding’s version of Ponta De Areia
Esperanza Spalding - Ponta De Aeria
She explores a blend of Brazilian music with Niño Josele playing flamenco guitar in her rendition of the Baden Powell, Vinicius de Moraes tune:
Here’s hoping Spalding’s win will encourage some young folks (and oldsters too) to explore music that crosses borders and boundaries.
Though much of the TM has dedicated itself to reporting the nasty behavior of pre-teens and teens who defaced Spalding's wiki page because they were disappointed by the loss of their idol Justin Bieber, Bieber himself was gracious about her win.
I am delighted to applaud a young sister who has enriched her musical portfolio delving into the rich treasures of jazz, soul, R&B and Brazil and forged her own unique sound.
Here’s her Nobel Peace Prize ceremony performance:
Before we leave the Grammy’s I would be remiss if I failed to mention a first Grammy win for Mavis Staples. Ironically after a more than 50 year career as a gospel and soul Diva she won in the “Americana ” category :
Overcome with emotion, Staples, 71, clutched her award during the Pre-Telecast Ceremony and proclaimed the honour had been "a long time coming."
Staples may have been flustered after the unexpected win, but the Chicago native, who's been in the music industry since the 1950s, was nonetheless utterly charismatic during her acceptance speech.
Before thanking 'You Are Not Alone' producer Jeff Tweedy of Wilco for bringing the "youngsters" back to her, the legendary singer took pause to remark how ravishing she looked in her shimmering maroon gown after catching a glimpse of herself on a television monitor. It was a move that was met by cheers from the room, and exemplified her lasting star power as did her performance earlier in the night along side Buddy Guy and Cyndi Lauper.
Staples beat out Rosanne Cash, Los Lobos, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant for the Grammy, and promises this isn't the last the world has seen from Mavis Staples.
You are not Alone
So we saw fresh young faces and older familiar ones at the Grammy’s.
Look forward to the launch of our new Black Kos Community here at DK4 and as we sail into orange cyberspace in the new format here’s some more music to read by.
Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage.
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
Disparities in health care access. LA Times: African Americans have fewer options for donor organs and bone marrow.
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
The story this week on Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter who donated a kidney to one of his players is a reminder not only of the depth of some people's generosity but also of the need for more tissue donation to serve African Americans and other under-represented minority groups.
Walter donated a kidney to Kevin Jordan, 19, after Jordan became ill from a disease called anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody vasculitis. Jordan, an African American, was undergoing kidney dialysis while in search of a donor kidney. His relatives were not matches for donation. Although his coach is white, Walter was a match. Typically, people are more likely to find a donor match from someone of their own race or ethnicity.
African Americans have a much harder time finding donor organs and donor bone marrow. Nordstrom Inc. is running a campaign this month to raise awareness of the need for more African American marrow and umbilical cord blood donors. For every person who joins the "Be the Match Registry" as a potential marrow donor, Nordstrom will cover the $100 registry cost.
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
Unity in a city that has seen some ethnic tensions. LA Times: South-Central L.A.'s black and Latino business owners join forces with hope for the future.
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
Bowers and Sons Cleaners on Central Avenue has managed to survive many an ill wind in its more than half a century in historic South-Central L.A.
A crack house used to operate across the street. Rioters once showed up determined to burn the place down with Molotov cocktails. The whole casual-dress craze wasn't great for business either.
But these days, Vivian Bowers — the Bowers daughter who now runs the place — is dreaming big. She's thinking Central Avenue might be on the cusp of a renaissance. And in her fight to bring back the historic heart of African American Los Angeles, she's got some new, unexpected allies.
A score of Latino entrepreneurs has banded together to elect Bowers, who is black, president of the new Central Avenue Business Assn. The group meets regularly to press city officials to give the long-neglected neighborhood its due.
"She is an honest person, a very hard-working woman and very dedicated to the community," said Virginia Zesati, the Mexican-born owner of a Central Avenue hair and nail salon. "We're all in this together. Among us there are no differences of color."
Bowers and Zesati have known each other a long time. Zesati and her family live in a home behind the dry cleaners. And on April 30, 1992, when rioters tried to set the dry cleaners on fire, Zesati's late husband, Gerardo Carrillo, came to the rescue.
"The Fire Department wouldn't come, so Mr. Carrillo hooked a bunch of garden hoses together and put out the fire," Bowers said.
Vivian Bowers runs Bowers and Sons Cleaners on Central Avenue in Historic South-Central Los Angeles. Bowers was recently elected president of the Central Avenue Business Assn., which lobbies the city for resources for this long-neglected neighborhood. (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
In the 19th century, many naturalists were steeped in racial prejudices and stereotypes. New York Times: Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon. He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown outside West Africa. The gorilla’s resemblance to humans astonished many people, especially after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” later that year. The politician Edwin M. Stanton was soon calling Abraham Lincoln “the original gorilla” and joking that Du Chaillu was a fool to have gone to Africa for what he could as easily have found in Springfield, Ill.
But the more common way to deal with our resemblance to monkeys and apes then was to fob it off onto other ethnic groups — typically black people, or sometimes the Irish. A few white scientists even purported to find physiological evidence, in the configuration of the skull, for classifying other races as separate species, not quite as far removed as Caucasians from our primate cousins. This undercurrent of scientific racism would play out to devastating effect in Du Chaillu’s own life.
When Du Chaillu arrived in London for the 1861 publication of his book, “Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,” he became the most celebrated figure of the season, and then, overnight, the most notorious. He was, by all accounts, a charismatic presence, about 30 years old, with a thick moustache, a prominent brow, and bright, flashing eyes. He also had a gift for colorful lectures about hunting fierce animals and befriending cannibals.
But scientists were soon ripping him to bits in the British press, saying that he exaggerated his own adventures and gave too little credit to other explorers, including some he plagiarized. Many of these complaints seem to have been valid. In particular, Du Chaillu’s depiction of the gorilla as a ferocious monster — “some hellish dream creature” — grossly distorted the image of these generally placid animals. (His stories were still around decades later serving as raw material for the Hollywood legend of King Kong.)
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
There is no more pressing topic in education today than closing the achievement gap, and there is no one in America who knows more about the gap than Ronald Ferguson.. New York Times: Closing the Achievement Gap Without Widening a Racial One
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
Although he is a Harvard professor based in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Ferguson, 60, spends lots of time flying around the country visiting racially mixed public high schools. Part of what he does is academic, measuring the causes of the gap by annually surveying the performance, behaviors and attitudes of up to 100,000 students. And part is serving as a de facto educational social worker, meeting with students, faculty members and parents to explain what steps their schools can take to narrow the gap.
The gap is about race, of course, and it inevitably inflames passions. But there is something about Dr. Ferguson’s bearing — he is both big (6-foot-3) and soft-spoken — that gets people to listen.
Morton Sherman, the Alexandria school superintendent, watched him defuse the anger at a meeting of 300 people. “He talks about these things in a professorial way, a kind way,” Dr. Sherman said. “It’s not about him. He doesn’t try to be a rock star, although he is a rock star in this field.”
While he has a personal stake in closing the gap as an African-American parent who has raised three boys, Dr. Ferguson does not get emotional in tense situations — he gets factual.
He is frequently quoted in the news media, and in recent months, he has played a major role in four important educational stories: the Gates study on evaluating teachers (his research shows that when kids say a teacher is good, they usually know what they’re talking about); the Council of the Great City Schools study of the widening gap between white and black boys (12 percent of black fourth-grade boys were proficient in reading on a national test, compared with 38 percent of whites); a front-page story in The New York Times last year on the effectiveness of big high schools (at a time when small schools are in vogue); and as a member of the eight-person New York State panel that decided whether Cathleen P. Black should qualify for a waiver to be New York City’s chancellor (he won’t say how he voted).
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Valentine's Day has passed and the greeting card roses shed red petals
that have settled on a tray of dark chocolates. No matter how treacle
or obvious this Madison Avenue diaspora of boy meets girl may be;
these demonstrations of affection are encouraged in America, mightily.
But the truth is that the diaspora of America is not relegated to only
boy meets girl; it is so, so much more broad than that.
A History of Sexual Preference
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/...
We are walking our very public attraction
through eighteenth-century Philadelphia.
I am simultaneously butch girlfriend
and suburban child on a school trip,
Independence Hall, 1775, home
to the Second Continental Congress.
Although she is wearing her leather jacket,
although we have made love for the first time
in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square,
I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia,
from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied
residential street in the nation,
from Carpenters’ Hall, from Congress Hall,
from Graff House where the young Thomas
Jefferson lived, summer of 1776. In my starched shirt
and waistcoat, in my leggings and buckled shoes,
in postmodern drag, as a young eighteenth-century statesman,
I am seventeen and tired of fighting for freedom
and the rights of men. I am already dreaming of Boston—
city of women, demonstrations, and revolution
on a grand and personal scale.
Then the maître d’
is pulling out our chairs for brunch, we have the
surprised look of people who have been kissing
and now find themselves dressed and dining
in a Locust Street townhouse turned café,
who do not know one another very well, who continue
with optimism to pursue relationship. Eternity
may simply be our mortal default mechanism
set on hope despite all evidence. In this mood,
I roll up my shirtsleeves and she touches my elbow.
I refuse the seedy view from the hotel window.
I picture instead their silver inkstands,
the hoopskirt factory on Arch Street,
the Wireworks, their eighteenth-century herb gardens,
their nineteenth-century row houses restored
with period door knockers.
Step outside.
We have been deeded the largest landscaped space
within a city anywhere in the world. In Fairmount Park,
on horseback, among the ancient ginkgoes, oaks, persimmons,
and magnolias, we are seventeen and imperishable, cutting classes
May of our senior year. And I am happy as the young
Tom Jefferson, unbuttoning my collar, imagining his power,
considering my healthy body, how I might use it in the service
of the country of my pleasure.
-- Robin Becker http://www.poetryfoundation.org/...
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
Welcome to the new Front Porch. We got some new fabric for the cushions, added a few more chairs, and a hammock for those who need a nap.
Food on the table today is Brazilian feijoada, with rice and beans. Caipirinha to drink for alcohol lovers and Guaraná juice and Brazilian coffee for those who don't.