Esperanza Spalding

NATIONAL POST
By Mike Doherty

Even before her Grammy Award for best new artist, Esperanza Spalding was being touted in jazz circles as a great new hope for the genre. And when the double bassist who sings like a streetwise angel beat Justin Bieber and Drake at the awards in February, media everywhere picked up the tune.
Spalding shrugs at her perceived importance to jazz — “The music will be fine no matter what happens,” she says — but nonetheless she’s not shirking the mantle being placed on her shoulders. She hopes to help bring the music she loves back into the mainstream.
“I don’t think we’re in a dry spell of listener capacity and listener understanding,” she says, on the phone from her Manhattan apartment a few weeks before heading to Montreal for the city’s 32nd International Jazz Festival. “I just think we’re in a dry spell of the diversity of information that’s shared on a large scale.” She believes everyone is well-equipped to appreciate many styles of music — jazz included — if they’re exposed to them and offered what she calls “the key” to unlock what might otherwise seem to be an “abstract game.”

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