You can’t tell by looking at some people that hurricanes are raging inside them. The bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, for example. With her super star smile, she can make every room and every picture shine a hundred lux brighter and this afternoon also the zoom tile, in which you can see how she is sitting in an old building with stucco ceilings in front of a window in Oslo, behind which there is a black and white blue Scandinavian autumn sky opens. “Hello!” Even the greeting sounds like a G major chord. When singing, that slightly euphoric undertone in her voice is contagious. There is such a slight pressure on the larynx that occurs in normal people when they are freshly in love, and in really gifted singers when they put a maximum of what used to be called “positive vibrations” in their voices “designated.
Lifelong happiness would help, one would think. With Esperanza Spalding, you don’t find the abysses either in the music or in the biography. At 15 she released her first jazz album. She worked with Janelle Monáe, Bruno Mars and Harry Belafonte. She is one of Barack Obama’s favorite jazz musicians, who took her to the White House quite often and then took her to Oslo to play at his Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Whereby “jazz musician” falls short again. Since she recorded her album “Emily’s D + Evolution” with David Bowie’s house producer Tony Visconti five years ago, she has broken down genre boundaries in her music. One could also mention that four years ago she got a professorship at Harvard University and wrote the opera “Iphigenia” with the legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter, which premiered on November 12th at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. And that she turned 37 in October.
Spalding not only brought a Tamil singer and a bone flute player from the Hopi tribe
Now she has the album right now “Songwright’s Apothecary Lab” brought out, which is a great success in terms of music history, because it breaks new ground for music. Not in the avant-garde sense, that remains largely in the well-tempered tonality. First of all, the music puts you in a good mood. “Oh, that’s nice. Thank you very much. Really.” Still no hint of the dark side of Esperanza Spalding. This is a really serious topic. On this new album she searches for the healing power of music. Not only because, like all jazz musicians, she is driven by a notorious curiosity that has already driven many to Africa, Asia, churches, mosques and pagodas, and above all in forms and worlds of sound that did not exist at the time. Not even as a spiritual quest, as so many have done before her, Alice and John Coltrane, for example, or Pharoah Sanders.
Hurricane inside: Esperanza Spalding on double bass.
(Photo: Samuel Prather)
Esperanza Spalding not only brought together a Tamil singer, a bone flute player from the Hopi tribe and bands in Oregon and Brooklyn, but also acousticians, psychologists, neuroscientists, specialists in early childhood development and therapists. With them she wanted to find out what effects music could have from a neurological point of view. That sounds surprisingly catchy between singer-songwriter pieces, minimal music and jazz, but similar to complex musicians like Joni Mitchell, Steve Reich or Wayne Shorter, whom she admires, complex structures are hidden behind supposedly simple motifs and compositions and thoughts. And then just this deep exploration in the sciences.
War returnees with post-traumatic stress syndromes were sent to sing in a choir
The search has been going on for a good five years. It started with a friend who had to cope with a trauma and who gave her books: “Healing Developmental Trauma” by Laurence Heller, for example, or “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk. Heavy psychotherapeutic goods. What particularly impressed Spalding was a chapter in van der Kolk’s book that described how a group of war returnees with severe post-traumatic stress syndromes were sent to choir. They were not cured. There are also psychological wounds that remain. But singing helped them come to terms with their lives again.
And her friend? She doesn’t want to talk about them, that is their private, personal trauma. But: “Most people have experienced some form of trauma, be it a car accident, be it growing up in a schizophrenic nation like the United States, be it having brown skin, be it immigrant existence, poverty, a parent’s alcoholism. ” She takes a breath. “This moment that we are now living in is traumatic.” And yes, she’s struggling with her own personal trauma. “I had a pretty difficult childhood,” she says. “Crazy things. Not as crazy as with many people I know, but I realized that my methods of dealing with them would not help me in the long run.”
Displacement Mechanisms? Depressions? She shakes her head. “Everyone finds different strategies for themselves to survive.” Short break. “Some of them are then deeply open, sociable and helpful. It looks different for everyone.”
Music has always been a refuge for her. No escape. Big difference. “From what I know about the history of what we call jazz, I can safely say that it is a sacred, therapeutic, liberating method. I mean, you cannot tell the story of the people who made the music separate from the music. It was created in an acutely violent social context. From this this music developed for the people who were the target of these systemic systems of oppression. Therefore, the music carries a very powerful, relaxing, liberating, invigorating, nourishing and healing energy She does. We know that. It’s very obvious. ” If something is important to her, she likes to phrase it several times.
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So it was only a logical step to deal with the healing power of music at the very time when all of humanity was chased into trauma by the virus and its consequences.
She had already made a first attempt with the album “12 Little Spells”, on which she assigned a body part to each song. However, the scientific work began with the preparations for “Songwright’s Apothecary Lab” in the first months of Covid at countless Zoom conferences with the scientists and therapists. They first had to get used to the idea that a musician never knows who is listening to her song, when and in what condition. And the songs should make a difference. “If a person is in a certain energetic or neurological state, soothing music can sometimes trigger something in them. That is not necessarily helpful. The first conversations were really very difficult.”
The low E on the double bass, for example, relieves pain
They worked with the Safe and Sound Protocol developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges. He found out how certain frequencies affect the nervous system. Targeted use of certain frequencies can alleviate trauma disorders by helping people regulate the anxiety and alarm conditions that trigger such trauma. But you can also use it very directly. The low E on the double bass, for example, relieves pain.
Spalding took her first pictures in Wasco County, with its endless plains in northern Oregon and in Portland, where she grew up. They later recorded in New York. Always there is the music therapist Marisol Norris and the sound engineer Sam Curtis, who has mastered the Safe and Sound Protocol.
On the website there are instructions on which moods the songs should work on, almost like package inserts for medication. There are no titles either. Each piece is a “Formwela”, a formula. The “Formwela 2” is “a gentle swinging embrace, while the air in the room soaks up the latent undercurrent that is able to envelop and expand interpersonal tension, grief, grief and / or aggression.” Sounds a lot more esoteric in this description than in music. The “Formwela 10“For example, it was released as a single that could also be played on the radio. You should listen to it” to mourn the consequences of your own romantic aspirations, to become more attentive and to dissolve them “.
But the realization remains that music can have effects
By the way, they didn’t use the Safe and Sound Protocol, didn’t structure frequencies in such a way that they had a neurological effect. “We originally wanted to record a Formwela for someone who is aggressive and fills the whole space around him with his anger. But then we thought about it, we don’t even know where the aggression is coming from, whether this person might need our empathy rather than influencing them for our own wellbeing. ” It wasn’t a musical question, but an ethical one.
No, “Songwright’s Apothecary Lab” is still a large audience album, not a therapy for an individual. Everyone has to discover the effect for themselves. She wrote catchy melodies that you could hum to yourself if you discovered that one of these form welas would help you. But the realization remains that music can develop effects that go far beyond the reactions that one is already familiar with. She is there on a track that can lead to the deepest depths of people.