Wellington Jazz Festival: esperanza Spalding (Wellington Opera House 19 October 2024)

Photo- Nick George Wellington Jazz Festival

Portland born jazz vocalist and bass player Esperanza Spalding was a highlight of this year’s jazz festival.  Her name is well known, even if her music can be, mmmm, let's say a little bit challenging to hum along to.  

Much of it draws inspiration from Jazz and Hispanic roots, which clearly came to pass in the opening numbers.  Playing to a sold-out Opera House, she drifts in, accompanied by percussionist Eric Doob and guitarist Matthew Stevens.  Their roles tonight will be to create the architecture on which her vastly expressive, experimental music.  

Often jazz, especially avant-garde jazz can come across to many as untouchable, academic, bewildering.  But esperanza's music is all that yet accessible, too.  It's as if she's brought her own colourbox  of magical, music paint and covered you in her spells, bright and sparkling aural goodness. 

If there was an agenda for tonight, it was around the movement of the body, through the day.  Each song was corresponded to a time of day – Morning, Midday, The Golden Hour and ‘Sexy Bed Time.”  The lighting provided a backdrop of ochres for the dawn, bright warm yellows for daylight, pinks and oranges for the evening and stars for the nighttime.    

Photo- Nick George Wellington Jazz Festival

“We all know what time of year it is…at least in my country…we get into Halloween in a big way…So, lets shake all those demons loose!”  And so, beginning by herself on piano, we start with what she calls her “spooky song”.  You could think that she’s being a little bit flaky but instead it’s her warm, kind personality that comes across.  Often Jazz musicians (especially the ‘overachievers’, as she called herself) are serious, a bit shy.  This was not the case.  Esperanza was having fun, and that energy showed through.

The first was ‘Ponta de Areia’, a Milton Nascimento/Wayne Shorter number, sung in Portuguese, in honour of her recent collaboration with the man on ’Milton + esperanza’ (2024).  

Photo- Nick George Wellington Jazz Festival

Her range is incredible, the high soprano notes literally drop off the cliff down to the altos and scale the heights again and again, encircling her piano’s alternative apex repetitively.  

A tune from the ‘12 Little Spells’ (2019) album dedicated to the thoracic spine comes next.  “I bet no one has ever written a song to the spine before!” Played on her double bass with a deft hand, and more soaring vocals, accompanied by two dancers Tashae Udo and Kaylim Horrigan.   Their movements are fluid motions, like oil swirling in water, mesmerising and enchanting.   Both based at the NYC-based Antonio Brown Dance, they use the studio’s trademark street ballet to convey the stories for the body.  So much of her music is about physical movement.  It makes sense to include them.  This works especially well with the tracks from ‘…Spells’, which makes up most of tonight’s repertoire.  ‘Dancing The Animal’ is fabulously lith.  

Photo- Nick George Wellington Jazz Festival

Then there’s the dirty grind funk of ‘Thang’, a song dedicated, unabashedly to hip movements.  It flows like water, balanced by Doob’s sassy, swaggering drum solo.  Doob plays with his sticks, brushes, hands and even feet.  But also with his soul, owning every expressive beat, layering up his piece from a simple and slow breath to a relentless panting.  Towards the end of the song Esperanza joins her ladies in a slow, soulful twerk dance that is as funny as it joyful.  She’s really enjoying the interactions between music and motion.          

There’s a reference to last night’s performance of ‘ORO MĀIA, poems by acclaimed American poet, storyteller and activist Dr Maya Angelou translated into te reo Māori.  What inspiration, she notes.  It’s so great to see disenfranchised Black and Brown voices recognised and given the freedom to speak.  This was the natural introduction to her 60’s inspired Human Rights number ‘Black Gold’.  

Back to body and soul, ‘Touch In Mine’ is a reminder of the power of physical touch’.  “Take a moment each day to reach out consider what you have in your hand.  A bag, your knee, the hand of your lover – your phone!” 

Photo- Nick George Wellington Jazz Festival

It’s amazing how fast two hours can go when you are bewitched as I was. The ovation that finished the night was loud, appreciative, and long.  We all on our feet, unison in the connection we had with the energy of the room.  Music has the power to connect you when the right person is in control.  Like the Pied Piper, she commanded our hearts for that time - mesmerising, eclectic and utter spellbinding.

A final encore came after a huge onslaught of applause and stamping.  A rug coms out and the band congregate together as if around a campfire for the utterly beautiful ballad ‘Formwela 4’.  That breaks out into a spot of improvisation.  “As an over achiever,” she says, “I was always trying to do better, get better, be better, beat the boys, play classical and jazz and pop and dance and everything! It’s exhausting!  So, I’ve written this one note for me, to play over and over.”  

Photo- Nick George Wellington Jazz Festival

She plays the note on the keyboard repetitively, humming a short phrase repeatedly, asking the audience to sing it back over and over.  We all do.  It’s like that moment when you all sing together and for this time you are all connected by the harmonics in the room.  Nothing else matters.  That was the special moment that made this concert, and this is what Esperanza Spalding brought to Pōneke this evening. No words can say more.