It was during Samora Pinderhughes‘ set when the thunderstorm hit. You could hear the thunder inside the hall while he was just announcing his next song. Samora played tunes from his formidable album “Grief” and he had the pleasure of working with the North Sea String Quartet which happened to be special guest for several…
So here we are again. North Sea Jazz in Rotterdam has started on a sweltering day. My first show of the festival was a classic: pianist Kenny Barron, who recently turned 80 and who remembered the days at The Hague and couldn’t really tell when he first started to play at North Sea, played a…
When singer, bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding brought her latest project to the stage last fall, I wrote about choreographed weirdness after seeing the Berlin concert (October 31st, UdK Hall). Esperanza has now followed her tour with the respective album, a 12-tracker just released on Concord Records. And it sounds like a Joni Mitchell record….
Esperanza Spalding presented her alter ego Emily last night at Berlin’s UdK main hall. Her new show, called “Emily’s D+Evolution”, is part theater, part musical, and autobiographical. Emily is Esperanza’s middle name and D+Evolution refers to, according to an interview she did earlier this year with the Village Voice, “the nonsense notion that organized education is…
The acclaimed bassist, composer, singer, and producer Esperanza Spalding is currently performing with her Emily’s D+Evolution project in California and Arizona before embarking to Japan where she plays Tokyo, Toyama, and Nagoya. Her project draws heavily from experimental theater and literature movements and earlier this week, her European tour dates were announced. “Emily is my…