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Esperanza Spalding | Essential albums and listening guide
Explore Esperanza Spalding through Chamber Music Society. Discover what to listen for and follow related styles to your next record.
Esperanza Spalding
Meet the artist
A bassist-singer with a unique style of fingerstyle playing, who crosses the boundaries between jazz and various types of pop music. Voice and bass can trace independent lines rather than simply double one another.
Improvisational thinking animates both chamber-like settings with strings and sounds closer to soul and pop. Complex forms retain the accessibility of song. Singing while playing bass softens the conventional distinction between lead and accompaniment. Moving among performance, composition and voice, she makes contemporary jazz's many-sided character feel natural.
Where to start listening
Enter through the voice, then turn toward the bass melody. Listen for passages where voice, bass, and surrounding instruments move independently.
2010Chamber Music Society
Esperanza Spalding
An ambitious work that combines a chamber music string arrangement with jazz and vocal elements. Released after winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, it became the best-selling contemporary jazz album of 2011.
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2012Radio Music Society
Esperanza Spalding
A concept album that spans the genres of jazz, R&B, and gospel. It features a big band arrangement and arrangements by Wayne Shorter. This album won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
Open this album in the Atlas →
Years follow the Atlas catalogue. Recording dates, original release dates and digital reissue dates may differ.