Esperanza Spalding

Esperanza Spalding is an American jazz artist from Portland, Oregon who has been active since 2000 and has released several studio albums through Hush Records, Merge Records and Head Up International. She is best known for her unique style that uses jazz fusion, neo soul and bossa nova to create an enchanting mix. She is also a musician who plays the bass guitar and the upright bass. Added to being an artist, she is also a composer, a bandleader and an educator. Over the course of her career, she has been associated with a number of artists including Joe Lovano, Stanley Clarke and Patti Austin. She has also made history by becoming the first ever jazz artist to win the Grammy Award as the Best New Artist, a feat that definitely deserves seeing her live through Esperanza Spalding tickets.
 
Esperanza Spalding grew up in the one of the scariest neighborhoods of Portland where she was raised by her mother as a single parent. At a young age, she was encourage by her artist mother towards singing and she particularly became inspired towards music when she watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which Yo-Yo Ma, a classical cellist, perform. This led to her getting inspired and deciding on music as her career. By the age of five, she had learned how to play the violin on her own and was performing with the Chamber Music Society of Oregon, continuing to perform with the group until the age of fifteen when she left, having become the concertmaster. She spent much of her early life being homeschooled due to being sick for a long time.
 
Esperanza Spalding also learned to play the guitar as a student alongside her mother, who was being taught the guitar by her college teacher. Before the bass, she learned how to play the clarinet and the oboe and performed her first live gig at the age of fifteen in a local blues club. She then joined a local blues band and performed with them for a year. She also won a scholarship to study for a year at The Northwest Academy and then began to write her own songs, starting out as the vocalist for Noise for Pretend. Through a music scholarship, she went on to study at the Portland State University and then the Berklee College of Music through a full scholarship. In 2005, she won the Boston Jazz Society scholarship, awarded for outstanding musicianship, and was reviewed by The New York Times as having a ‘daydream’ voice. In 2006, she released her first album Junjo through Avya and performed as a supporting artist for Ella Fitzgerald’s tribute tour, For Ella.
 
Added to teaching at the Berklee College of Music, Esperanza Spalding released her second self-titled album which led to her winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. The album also charted on the Billboard 200 chart and in 2009, performed at the Oslo City Hall during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in front of President Barack Obama and again at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert held the next day; she performed after being personally selected by President Barack Obama, a tradition of the Nobel Prize laureates picking an artist to perform live. In 2009, she also performed live at the Park City Jazz Festival, one of the best known jazz festivals in the US. She also performed at a concert in tribute to Prince alongside Alicia Keys, Patti LaBelle and Janelle Monae. In 2010, she performed live on Austin City Limits, a PBS TV show, and became the most searched person on Google as a result.
 
Esperanza Spalding has released four studio albums and won a Grammy Award and the Boston Music Award for the Jazz Artist of the Year; two achievements that make her an artist to listen to for the finest jazz, courtesy of Esperanza Spalding tickets.