Esperanza Spalding plays barefoot when she can. Not for any mystical reason, she’s careful to say — she just doesn’t like the way shoes change her relationship with the floor. “The floor is the rhythm,” she explains. “Everything comes up from there.”
We’re speaking over video from her home studio, which is crammed, lovingly, with instruments. A Rhodes. Several basses. A wall of notebooks.
You’ve talked before about rejecting the genre label “jazz vocalist.” Does that still feel important to you?
More than ever. Not because I don’t love jazz — I love it desperately — but because naming something too quickly forecloses possibilities before you even get started. I want to arrive at the music without the sign already hung on the door.
Your last record felt more composed, more fixed. This new work sounds like you’re giving yourself more room to not-know.
That’s exactly it. I spent years getting technically strong, getting my theory airtight, being able to execute. And then I realized I had maybe too much command. I needed to walk back into the place where I’m uncertain. Uncertainty is where the interesting things happen.
How do you walk back into uncertainty intentionally?
I change the physical constraints. Different tuning. Playing something I’m not fluent on. Writing with my non-dominant hand. The brain has to work harder. It can’t default. I also spend a lot of time in silence before I play anything, just listening to what’s already in the room.
Is there a figure in jazz history whose relationship to composition has influenced you most?
Wayne Shorter, always. The thing about Wayne is that his compositions look simple on paper and feel inevitable when you hear them, but they’re completely resistant to easy interpretation. Every time you play “Infant Eyes,” you have to reinvent your relationship to it. He built that in. That’s extraordinary craft.
What are you afraid of, musically?
Comfort. Competence becoming a ceiling. I’d rather make a beautiful mistake than a perfect performance of something already solved.
When we finish, she doesn’t close the laptop immediately. She turns to her left — toward the wall of basses — and stays there for a moment, not reaching for anything. Just looking.
Some habits you don’t explain.
