ESPERANZA SPALDING: Somebody introduced me to L’Rain through a live performance that she did online, maybe with NPR or something, and I was just so taken with her as a composer and as an instrumentalist. In that live show, there were clearly songs but there was also this on-the-spot composing she was doing with all these effects and pedals and loopers and samples through her guitar. So, yeah, I was taken with her musicianship first, and then I went and checked out her albums.

Actually, the first thing I heard from the album that “Blame Me” is on [2021’s Fatigue] was the song “Suck Teeth”, and that’s really the one that caught me and drew me into the record. But then as I was listening to it again, “Blame Me” is the one that I thought of in the context of this interview.

ESPERANZA SPALDING: In case there’s somebody reading this who doesn’t know about Wayne Shorter – like, I don’t know who you are, but in case you exist on Planet Earth and you’re reading this – you need to know about this phenomenon that he brought into existence of having an improvising ensemble melded with an orchestra. There had never been a thing like that before. He’s the philosophical leader of the ensemble and the full composer and orchestrator of the symphonic, written music.

I mean, it’s so unbelievable, so far beyond anything that had happened in that realm, and I always want to bring people to it. I always want to give people the chance not just to know about it but to feel its powerful field of sensation and sound and texture. It’s just such a gift, to have access to and immerse oneself in what Wayne and his collaborators created and offered forth. It's just unbelievably healthful and generous in blessings, you know?

BEST FIT: In your email, you specified two versions: one from the album Without A Net and the other from EMANON. Do you prefer one over the other depending on a certain mood?

No, you should listen to both. They're very different, of course, but I just think that it's good to hear both.

And how did you personally discover Wayne's music?

I know I heard him as a teenager but I don’t remember exactly how or when. There are a lot of jazz musicians here in Portland, and there was a lot of exchange going on at the time that I was coming up in music here, so in some kind of way – maybe at a jam session or at a dinner or something – I definitely heard him. I think somebody introduced me to Weather Report around that time, but I couldn't hear it. Like, my brain wasn't evolved enough or whatever. So I didn’t spend much time with his music until I was a bit older.

Incredibly, you had the opportunity to compose an opera together with him, which you also starred in, not long before he passed away. How was that experience for you?

Indescribable in a way that we don’t have enough time to go into here [laughs]. But I wouldn’t say that I starred in the opera. Okay, I had a role in it, but I think anybody could be in that role. And I only did that because he asked me to. I didn’t want to do it, and to be honest I didn’t want to write the libretto either. I just wanted to help make it happen, because it was so important that a person like Wayne Shorter wanted to write an opera.

My original role was as creative producer, just trying to get the team together, but then everything just grew and grew and grew. He was petitioning me to write the libretto and I finally gave in. Then he was petitioning me to be in the thing, and again I finally gave in. I’m so grateful, of course, but it was really difficult. The redeeming factor was having all those years to work so closely with and learn with Wayne, but I don’t think I would do that again as an undertaking.

In which ways was it challenging?

It's challenging because this arts funding world has this fucked up, ageist, classist, racist attitude. It’s slightly getting better in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement here in the United States, but no one would fund this opera at the time. It was like pulling teeth or like looking for diamonds in a river. It was ridiculous. It took a ridiculous amount of effort just to get this global treasure the support to write this opera.

It just wasn’t fair, and it really opened my eyes to how sick and commercial and classist the arts world is. You wouldn’t believe the things that people said to our faces, not thinking that they were being classist and racist and ageist. So I guess that a big wake-up call for me and it turned me into this slightly radicalised advocate for arts funding reform. Maybe that’s another benefit of the process, but it shouldn’t have been that hard. For someone like Wayne Shorter who had done so much at that point in his life, I feel like the opera world should have been leaping up to meet him, you know?

I bow to and celebrate everybody who recognised it for what it was early on in the process and committed to it, even we couldn’t get the funding to finish. We did, finally, but we had these champions on our side like Jeff Tang, Mara Isaacs and Cath Brittain, and everyone at places like ArtsEmerson, The Kennedy Center and the Broad Stage. Every one of those people spent way more hours than they got paid for to make it happen. That was also a redeeming factor, that these people who were ready to throw down for this project… I told you that you didn’t want to go into the details! [laughs]

BEST FIT: You've always said that Ornette Coleman has been such a huge inspiration for you. Not just musically, but in terms of how he conducted his career. Can you tell me a bit more about that and how you’ve held him up as a role model, in a way?

ESPERANZA SPALDING: Yeah, I mean, the more I accept about the reality and the history of the country I was born in, the more and more I appreciate people like Ornette Coleman. I mean, it's impossible to fully grasp what it meant for this grown man with a family – this Black man from the South – to choose to put his creative vision first. Only he and the people he came up around can fully grasp that, because it was such a different time and the social contexts were so different.

I think for him to have made that life choice is completely radical. It flies in the face of hundreds of years of programming that says someone like him doesn’t have a right to their own life. They don’t have a right to use their life for anything other than serving capitalism and white supremacy. So for him to say ‘No, I’m not owed to the system, I’m not owed to the structure, I have a right to be what I am,’ and to put that front and centre and dedicate all the hours of his waking life to bringing that out is so radical.

I know that, for a time, he worked as a carpenter when he wasn’t being paid for his musical gifts, and that was seriously challenging physical labour. This was before all the electric tools that we have today, so for him to, in the margins of all that labour, still create the work that he created is impossibly deep and original and liberatory. I feel that power of spirit and personality and life choice travelling through the music, and I think that the music itself can activate that in your DNA. Like, it’s frequentially stored in what he wrote.

I hope more people look into the history of his life and into the history of what was happening, socio-politically, in the time that he was born and grew up in. It’s the whole model that’s inspiring, not just the music. You know, I think Terri talks about this a lot, that particularly with Black jazz musicians, there’s often this kind of trend of almost extracting their musicianship and what they contributed musically and isolating it from their personal, social, familial, geographical and political context, as if they’re not intricately linked and informed by each other.

Rarely do I feel like I hear much about the context in which Ornette Coleman was doing all this. Even just imagining what kind of force and what kind of personal power it would take for someone to choose that path might give a clue to the kind of energy that you hear coming out of the music. Like, if you had to cultivate that power just to be able to pick up your saxophone and not have to do god-knows-what in terms of the work that was available for a Black man from Texas in his early twenties. Then if you put that in your compositions, if you put that in your band, that's a medicinal gift to humanity, for sure.

Do you remember the first time you heard the Something Else!!!! album and how it made you feel?

Oh, really, I don't remember. Again, probably in Portland sometime in my teenage years. I also was in an ensemble that played his music, led by a wonderful trombonist named Jeff Galindo, and that was really a chance to deep dive into it and play his music from the inside. To get to play that music over the course of half a year or whatever was, woooo, just blessings on blessings.

And why have you chosen this particular song from that record?

Oh, it's just one of my favourite songs by him. Maybe because it’s one you can sing, you know? The other ones can be really hard to sing. Like, if you don't have access to a music device and you just want to hear it, you can just hear it on the inside and kind of hum it to yourself.

ESPERANZA SPALDING: There is an interesting story behind [the libretto to La Bohème] in that the librettist nearly lost his mind trying to write it. But it’s actually this song that interested me. I heard it in college, in a music history class. The theme haunted me but I forgot the name. Then, during my season of studying opera, I came across it again and found many versions, but this performance struck me more than the rest.

People talk about how, in opera, time is slowed down, which is true. But that’s not the end of the story, because the most masterful opera performers have to make it not seem like time is slowed down. And this goddess right here, in this clip, sings the most masterful version that I have ever seen. Here is a woman completely embracing the fact that, yes, opera slows down time, but she uses every millisecond of the slow time so you feel like you’re also at that pace.

Her performance in this is crazy, and her voice is phenomenal. I know she’s lip synching to the song in the video, and that’s fine because it’s from a film, but it is really her singing.