10,000 hours in the woodshed
They say jazz music ain’t cheap. It costs a lot — musicians spending decades in the woodshed, practicing, busking on street corners, or playing in crummy, low-lit clubs, trying to be heard above the chatter and clink of long-neck bottles.
Ironically, legions of musicians struggle to make a living off of jazz. But the irony of a rarefied musical form emerging from the soul or the streets — only to be packaged for rich folks and ignored by the masses — is somehow wiped away in the presence of Esperanza Spalding. She’s a Jazz Artist, you see: she’s got the chops, both vocally and musically, to make a connection with anyone in a room. She’s got the warm, familiar stage rap, and the ability to command two halves of a room — like the Sunset Pavillion at Sofitel Hotel — to scat separate parts of a Brazilian chant on the set closer, I Adore You.
Spalding (with the help of the Philippine International Jazz and Arts Festival Foundation, Soul Experiment Productions and Jewelmar) brought her quartet to Manila for one night, and as always, jazz from the outside world seems like an alien visitation: a breath of fresh air from the planet Syncopation, in the faraway galaxy of Improvisation.
Not that jazz musicians here don’t cook. But you will notice that few Manila musicians subsist in one single band; they’re journeymen, taking gigs wherever they can. This might give them the requisite 10,000 hours of playing experience (according to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) needed for true genius to prosper; but it’s damned hard to rule out, say, playing weddings or commercial gigs if you’re a journeyman. And that stuff must eat away at your soul, bit by bit.
This condition is not limited to the Philippines, of course. Onstage, Spalding tells the crowd a story about “trying to write a hit song, something that will make us all millionaires.” She jokes that the song they eventually do play (She Got to You, I think) “should be recorded by Shakira.”
Spalding is an interesting amalgam of African-American and Spanish influences; she’s also part Welsh and Native-American, and sings in three languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese). Growing up in a single-parent home in Oregon, home-schooled, and playing violin at the age of five, Spalding was destined for prodigy-hood. Scholarships eventually led her to Boston’s Berklee College of Music where she was mentored by Gary Burton and Pat Metheny. Though she was gifted at composition and sight-reading, at one point she wanted to throw in the towel and switch to political science (according to Wikipedia); Metheny convinced her to stick with it. Imagine the mountains someone growing up in a “scary” part of Portland, Oregon had to overcome to embrace her jazz calling.
Spalding invites the audience to consider that “jazz is soul” in her opening number, and each musical piece that follows — switching nimbly from upright bass to electric and back to bowed upright — makes the connection clear. This isn’t cerebral music, something to think about, despite the fact that these musicians have put in their 10,000 hours; jazz, once again, reveals itself to be all about feeling in this quartet’s hands.
It could be that jazz is looking for a new lion, or lioness — someone to take up the mantle as Wynton Marsalis ages gracefully and a bunch of fusion hotshots slip out of popular playlists. She’s certainly got more chops in her little pinky than a crossover darling like Norah Jones. She’s spunky, feisty, with real stage presence. That this woman is only 24 and can command a crowd like nobody’s business will take her far down the perilous pathways of jazz.
We watch her fingers pump those fat upright strings: her playing is so strong, so in the pocket, the band have no choice but to follow along. With her wiggy head of hair, she can’t help but remind you of Stanley Clarke, and with her high-register vocals playing off ponytailed keyboardist Leo Genovese (who was rocking a Rhodes electric like Chick Corea or Keith Jarrett on an electric Miles gig) — well, the “Light as a Feather” comparisons were in the air. Her voice has been likened to Blossom Dearie’s, but Flora Purim is not far off, either.
Esperanza walks her bass and voice through an epic Wild is the Wind, a song popularized by Nina Simone and David Bowie, but which was actually written by Russian Dimitri Tiomkin for a ‘50s romance movie of the same name. She lives each moment of the overwrought lyric, or at least gives a great semblance of living it, despite her young years. We are left wanting a little bit more when Esperanza and her band depart the stage after a 75-minute set; this, too, is a trick of mastering jazz: making the crowd realize how precious it is, something to be savored, not spieled off as background muzak. Anyway, Spalding was gracious enough to offer a jazz clinic — free to ticket holders — earlier in the day at nearby bar 7Pecados (which fouled up the air after the Spalding concert with a typically lethal bar band playing numbing Lady Gaga covers, sonically deadly 20-minute versions of Rihanna’s Don’t Let the Music Stop, interspersed with shouts of “Jai Ho!” Seriously, now. What can kill jazz more easily than lethal bar bands?)
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I was happy to receive in my hand, right after the Esperanza Spalding show, a copy of Johnny Alegre’s latest CD, “Johnny Alegre 3,” featuring Ron McClure on bass and Billy Hart on drums. Recorded in New York, Johnny told me he “put a lot of work” into this latest release, and it shows. The interplay between Hart (who’s played with everyone from Miles Davis on the classic “sick jazz” outing “On the Corner” to Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul), McClure (worked with Wes Montgomery, John Scofield, Lee Konitz among many others) and Alegre recalls early ECM Pat Metheny once again, but with fractious bits of guitar bite mixed into the head on several pieces (Barnabas channels John McLaughlin, while Conundrum’s overdriven intro almost sounds like Deep Purple!).
I think it would be possible for musicians to base their entire jazz theory around “Bright Size Life,” the seminal Metheny/Jaco Pastorius/Bob Moses outing, and that would not be such a bad thing. Alegre’s playing here is introspective, which to some jazz ears might mean “tentative,” but while Alegre avoids the fanciful flights that Metheny takes in his later, less-introspective work, he has a remarkable ear for what fits between the silences of McClure and Hart. Working with a trio, without the bright counterpoint of Tots Tolentino on saxophone, Alegre layers his eight compositions with thoughtful — yes, introspective — melodies and accompaniments. The ballad From Long Ago is a standout, as is the solo piece, Theme from Humanfolk. Well worth checking out.
