Herstory 46: Esperanza Spalding Opens the Door by Demystifying Creativity

A Knock At The Door From Yo Yo Ma

Esperanza Spalding is an accomplished vocalist, bassist, composer, and professor. She’s made music history countless times already — she was the youngest faculty member at the Berklee College of Music and won the 2011 Grammy for Best New Artist — but for this Herstory, I dove into the ways that she’s made her sound and artistic practice accessible to music lovers. 

Sonically, Esperanza Spalding’s contemporary jazz weaves in and out of many other genres including r&b and funk, to name a few. Esperanza’s ability to fuse her sound has also led to collaborations with mainstream heavy hitters like Janelle Monáe and Bruno Mars. As a result of this, her discography has reached a wide range of audiences well outside of jazz enthusiasts. This kind of cross-pollination is actually similar to one of Esperanza’s early introductions to music, through the renowned cellist, Yo Yo Ma.

Born in the 1980s, the critical influences of Esperanza’s musical education were her mother, her hometown of Portland, Oregon, and television. An episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood featuring cellist Yo Yo Ma was the spark that led young Esperanza to pursue string instruments. In the interview below, she recalls her initiation reaction to hearing Yo Yo Ma at five years old.

“I can remember the sensation, like the total body activation hearing that music. I had never felt that sensation like that before and I just remember going, I have to do that. Whatever is happening right there, I need to do it.”

While we often see Esperanza alongside her double bass, she began her formal music education by playing the violin and a range of other instruments. As I write about her story, I can’t help but think about the countless others that have been inspired by that Yo Yo Ma episode over the years. From young children like Esperanza to their slightly older siblings and babysitters, even their parents perhaps. I can recall my own memories of discovering Yo Yo Ma through the TV screen, but my moment was when he graced Arthur. The carefully curated casts of these children’s shows have shaped so many of our dreams. For Esperanza, it led her to music and for others, it has likely sparked paths towards astronomy, marine biology and many of the other careers that Mister Rogers’ introduced us to.

The Making of Something From Nothing

Beyond the Mister Rogers Neighbourhood phase, Esperanza performed throughout her youth while being homeschooled. She eventually enrolled in a performing arts high school, dropped out, got her GED, and continued her studies at Berklee College of Music. At the age of 20, she had joined the faculty at the Berklee College of Music.

Fast forward to 2017 and she’d secured a Grammy award, a number of albums under her belt, and launched EXPOSURE (where she wrote, rehearsed, and recorded a full-length album in 77 hours). The entire endeavour was livestreamed on Facebook, and while it isn’t available for replay, there are a few snippets floating around the internet. For the most part, the project was a limited-release album, but by inviting us into the creative process, she demystified her craft in a similar way that Mister Rogers & Yo Yo Ma did all those years ago. In the livestream clip below, Esperanza is giving viewers a tour of the studio, breaking down who’s in the room and their role in creating the album. According to Pitchfork, the livestream amassed 1.4 million views and the physical copies sold out before it ended. 

Demystifying The Craft

As the pandemic endures, our relationship with artists has shifted to a place where a project like EXPOSURE would be a no-brainer. The mystery around an artist’s craft is vanishing more and more — we’ve gotten a look into their homes, watched them create in isolation and almost a year into the pandemic, gotten to listen to many creations that were born out of 2020. Livestreaming the creation of an album would fit perfectly in the current internet universe, but those 77 hours in 2017 are part of a different lifetime. That level of vulnerability and access wasn’t the norm yet.

Thinking back to Esperanza’s initial interest in Mister Rogers Neighbourhood, all of these virtual creations are making me wonder how the next generation will be inspired with so much at their fingertips. And now that our music scenes have been catapulted into the online universe, I’m curious about the type of creativity and improvisation that will be documented here. Whatever comes next, I think we can learn quite a lot from the way Spalding has welcomed exploration into her art.

Thanks for reading! This blog series is brought to you by Solidarity in Sound, an educational platform for the global, music community.

For our Herstory Lessons blog series — we're retelling the stories of women in music that have been misheard, mislabeled, or erased completely from our history books.

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