The Story
Esperanza Spalding grew up in Portland, Oregon, a self-taught violin prodigy who joined the Chamber Music Society of Oregon as a child before discovering the bass in high school. She earned a scholarship to Berklee College of Music and, at twenty, became one of the youngest instructors in the school's history — all before releasing her debut album, Junjo, in 2006.
Her breakthrough came fast. Esperanza (2008) topped Billboard's contemporary jazz chart, and Chamber Music Society (2010) fused jazz trio, strings and wordless vocals into something entirely her own. In February 2011 she stunned the industry by winning the Grammy for Best New Artist — the first jazz musician ever to do so — beating Justin Bieber, Drake, Florence + the Machine and Mumford & Sons.
Rather than settle into a lane, Spalding kept reinventing: the horn-driven Radio Music Society (2012), the theatrical alter-ego project Emily's D+Evolution (2016), and 12 Little Spells (2018), a song cycle mapping music onto parts of the body that the New York Times ranked among the best albums of its year. Songwrights Apothecary Lab (2021) — part album, part research practice into music as healing — extended her run of Grammy-winning work.
Now a professor at Harvard and a frequent collaborator across genres, Spalding released Milton + esperanza with Brazilian legend Milton Nascimento in 2024 and continues to tour worldwide, from South American concert halls to European jazz festivals.
