![]() ![]() For now, at least, she’s to be understood via the work. The character Emily, who “came to move and be loud and talk about D+Evolution,” took Spalding’s middle name and arrived at the bassist as a stroke of inspiration without a backstory. Art exists to describe and explain things that don’t survive well under literal explanation.” ![]() And they’ve gotten me to certain places, so is there a version of love, of romance, that’s neither, or a singularity that shows me the extremes of those two, or a singularity in the middle that’s more than either or more than both? Fortunately, art exists. “I know what those two feelings are when it comes to love, and I’ve explored them both. Struggling, I asked for an illustration of how the concept might relate to one of the new songs in particular, and Spalding demurred-“I wouldn’t say any one song can embody an idea that large”-before settling on “One.” “Again, let it be interpreted how people want to interpret it, but I would say there’s a question posed, and it’s set up with, I know about operating from my civilized mind, from my college-educated brain, and I know what it feels like to indulge in the primal,” she said. “It’s not that we’re always striving to become ‘better’ or ‘higher’ or more evolved spiritually or whatever.” “That is ‘evolution’ it’s not one-directional,” she explained. She went on to attribute another image she finds helpful, one of outstretched arms that seek a meaningful equilibrium between the noble and primitive. “He said, ‘Taking the best of the past and using it as a flashlight into the future.’ I think that’s a really important element-taking the best from the past.” “I’ll say it like this this is what Wayne said,” she began, invoking her North Star and jazz’s champion of bewildering aphorism. Elsewhere, when tackling the muse that is this concept of D+Evolution, things got trickier-cagey, but also earnest. These are unusual logistics, but Spalding was easygoing about detailing them. ![]() The corresponding live show, replete with sketches and other theatre elements, has also changed by wide margins, most recently being refined with the help of director and playwright Will Weigler. Released through her longtime home, Concord, after being shopped around, the album was re-recorded in front of a studio audience after the material had been developed further onstage. Spalding, 31, was there to promote her new album, Emily’s D+Evolution, a nebulous concept piece that nonetheless sounds like an excellent contemporary jazz-rock record, with state-of-the-art musicianship and (mostly) palatable lyrics about love and betrayal. A strange, sinking feeling settled in as I walked toward the train. There, questions often begat more questions-big ones, about things like artistic intention and authenticity and the trappings of recognition-to the point where I wasn’t sure what I had after 50 minutes. Personally, the performance felt like a reprieve of clear-eyed understanding, in light of a conversation I’d had with Spalding a day prior, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. Within a band that projects as a collective she stole the show, but the entire enterprise was successful in the most straightforward manner a tourist in search of the best current jazz in the jazz capital of the world could hardly have done better. Her spotlights became something to look forward to, and a lengthy bout of wordless scatting put the packed-out basement firmly under her command. She battened down the harmonic hatches whenever Allen began playing outside the changes or Carrington chopped the beat up, and her soloing, amply allotted, found her matching powerful physical grace with impressive lyricism. More so than the last ACS performance I heard, at the Town Hall in 2013, Spalding’s presence was a model of collaborative confidence. The band defined the self-aware elasticity that descends from Bill Evans’ trios and Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet-postbop, in a word-throughout a program of unimpeachable repertoire: Wayne Shorter’s “Masqualero” and “Virgo” Eric Dolphy’s “Miss Ann” Bob Dorough and Fran Landesman’s “Nothing Like You,” the oddball closer to Davis’ 1967 LP, Sorcerer. Like the most effective political arguments, the value of ACS is self-evident. That album was a genre-hopping, multigenerational celebration of jazz womanhood, which also makes ACS a feminist statement of sorts, though its epistle goes un-preached. It featured ACS, the all-star trio of pianist Geri Allen, bassist Esperanza Spalding and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, a group that has been active for over four years now, since surfacing as a kind of addendum to Carrington’s Grammy-winning The Mosaic Project. There was something both adventuresome and deeply comforting about a set I took in late last year at the Village Vanguard. ![]()
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