Spotlight On: ESPERANZA SPALDING

ABOUT this week’s podcast guest + radio hour featured interview:

This week we’re excited to help celebrate the release of Milton + esperanza - a new album by Brazilian legend, Milton Nascimento and musician, composer and producer, esperanza spalding. In addition to its intrinsic musical beauty, considering what this album represents lends a deeper meaning and makes it an even richer treasure trove - and with esperanza’s guidance and stories, that’s what we will explore together in today's conversation. Milton + esperanza is the meeting of two brilliant musical minds, it is an intergenerational and cross cultural connection, an unexpected honoring of their mutual friend and musical collaborator, the late Wayne Shorter, and a personal full circle moment for esperanza - which began when she was a Berklee College of Music student hearing Milton’s voice for the first time on a Wayne Shorter album, thanks to some Brazilian friends. Born in 1984, esperanza spalding was a wunderkind, and by age five she was playing violin with the Chamber Music Society in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Though a multi-instrumentalist, she found her instrument in the upright bass. After dropping out of high school at 15, she went to Portland State University, and then Berklee College of Music, both on full scholarship. At 20, she became the youngest instructor in Berklee’s history, and at 34 she earned an honorary doctorate, just a year after she began teaching at Harvard. For many, esperanza seemingly came out of nowhere in 2011, when she won a Grammy for Best New Artist, beating out Justin Bieber, Drake, Mumford & Sons, and Florence & The Machine. The Recording Academy had never given this honor to a jazz artist before, not to mention a female jazz artist. Today, esperanza has eight studio albums, two live albums, five grammys, and eleven nominations to her name. Plus, a jazz opera called Iphigenia that she wrote with her mentor Wayne Shorter, which premiered in 2021. We last caught up with esperanza that same year for the release of her last studio album, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, and now we are thrilled to welcome back esperanza spalding as this week’s SHERO in the Spotlight.