New Mexico Jazz Festival: Esperanza Spalding

Sponsored by Jack Kotz

Five-time Grammy Award winner, Doris Duke Foundation Artist (2024), and genre-crossing jazz and chamber-music innovator, esperanza spalding, presents a program emphasizing the simplicity and intimacy of her voice, bass, and songs, in this special trio configuration featuring Morgan Guerin on voice, saxophone and keys, and Eric Doob on drums, voice, and tracks. Performing songs from all 8 of her previous albums as well as songs from current releases, she will also share a special preview of her forthcoming project.

Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, spalding is an eaabibacliitoti* artist (European-African ancestored influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island) who is trained and initiated in the North American jazz lineage and tradition. In 2013, she performed for Outpost at the Lensic with the ACS Trio which featured pianist Geri Allen and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. Last heard at the 2015 NM Jazz Festival with her D+ Evolution Project, (a concert presented in partnership with AMP Concerts) spalding’s work “interweaves various combinations of instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land & artist-sanctuary custodianship, while growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, and friend, collaboratively decolonizing within and through her hometown community.”

Spalding founded and serves as co-director of Prismid Sanctuary, a non-profit that creates and stewards free artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon, and, with her dance project “Off Brand gOdds” and her therapeutic music incubator “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” she co-leads performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas and throughout the world.