esperanza spalding brings her healing music to Stanford Live

Step by step, note by note, and spell by spell, esperanza spalding seeks to break down the walls that keep music contained in clubs and concert halls.

The bassist, composer and vocalist won her fifth Grammy Award in March for her Concord album “Songwrights Apothecary Lab,” a set of tunes, or as spalding and her lab-mates call them, “formwelas,” that evolved out of her ongoing research into “the study healing strategies drawn from a diverse range of music-based creative and therapeutic practices,” as she writes on her website.

A collective endeavor that also unfolds in the ArtLab at Harvard University, where spalding is a professor in the music department, the S.A.L might sound esoteric, but in simple terms spalding wants to understand the ways in which music and human bodies interact.

Her most striking recent experiment is the 13-minute film “Formwela 12” featuring legendary dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, who cut a brilliant path across Broadway, ballet, Hollywood, and modern dance before shaping a rising generation of actors and playwrights at the Yale School of Drama (where students included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang and Wendy Wasserstein).

Spalding’s performance Thursday at Frost Amphitheater introduces the latest step in her ongoing investigations into the inextricably intertwined worlds of music and movement.

Co-presented by Stanford Live and SFJAZZ, “it’s a dovetail performance,” she said. “In the last few years of doing the ‘Apothecary Lab’ research I’ve touched the edge of this element of dance. I’ve been noticing how movement has been bifurcated from this dynamic improvisation-based music commonly called jazz.”

She started talking with New York dancer and choreographer Antonio Brown about collaborating while working on her 2018 album “12 Little Spells,” a project in which each song is linked to a specific body part (the album won the Grammy Award for best jazz vocal Album). But they fell out of touch when she moved to Los Angeles to finish and stage the opera she created with jazz legend Wayne Shorter, “…(Iphigenia),” which made its West Coast premiere last February at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. The work, for which spalding wrote the libretto, is a jazz/classical alternative take on the Greek mythology story.

In one of those kismet “patterns around us that seem to fall outside the laws of cause and effect,” just as she was starting to think again about how to bring dance and movement into the Apothecary Lab “he (Brown) emails me out of the blue asking if I want to work on something,” she said. “This is our dip into what’s possible.”

She’s joined by some of her closest musical confidants, including guitarist Matthew Stevens and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin on bass, saxophones and EWI (both players came through the Bay Area in February with drummer Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science). Rather than presenting a highly polished production, she sees the performances as part of the research process.

“I’m more interested in inviting people to get as close to the point of emergence of an idea or the result of an idea,” she said.

Spalding has carved out a singular position at the intersection of numerous disciplines and practices. Following up on the Cal Performances presentation of “…(Iphigenia),” she returns to Berkeley on Aug. 4 for a Greek Theatre performance as a special guest with the Encuentros Orchestra led by superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The project brings together more than 100 young musicians, ages, 18-26, from El Sistema-inspired programs across the Americas, Europe, and Asia to work together with students from the United States.

Spalding’s touring and other musical projects frequently bring her to the Bay Area. She performed at the star-studded opening of the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco in 2013. She is also one of S.F. Symphony’s eight Collaborative Partners, a creative team kicked off the by the orchestra under new music director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

She was a featured performer last October at the Davies Symphony Hall concert kicking off the Symphony’s 2021-22 season. The fact that Alonzo King LINES Ballet was part of the program was another kismet encounter with a choreographer she describes as her “hero.” Spalding has come to deeply identify with King’s insistence that music and dance, and musicians and dancers, are one and the same.

King is known for his collaborations with artists steeped in jazz, such as tenor sax star Charles Lloyd, pianist Jason Moran, and vocalist Lisa Fischer. Whether or not spalding joins their ranks, she’s determined to spend some time in King’s company.

“I’m going to have to come there and just be around,” she said. “They’re tending a particular frequency on the Earth that’s so healing and profound and educational and opening. It’s a frequency I need to expose myself to.”

Protean and uncontainable, spalding continues to follow her muses into territory rife with creative possibilities. And with each step, she seems to find collaborators ready and eager to join her dance.

Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].

ESPERANZA SPALDING

Performing as part of the Stanford Live Arts Festival

When: 7:30 p.m. July 14

Where: Frost Amphitheatre, 351 Lasuen St., Stanford University

Tickets: $15-$110; live.stanford.edu

 Upcoming festival performances: S.F. Symphony, with Time for Three (July 15); S.F. Symphony with pianist Inon Barnatan (July 22), Eddie Palmieri Caribbean Jazz Septet with Arturo Sandoval (July 23), singer Mon Laferte (July 24), S.F. Symphony with Pink Martini (July 29), Dianne Reeves with quintet and orchestra (July 31), Los Tigres del Norte (July 31), Complexions Contemporary Ballet (Aug. 3), S.F. Ballet (Aug. 6).