At last night’s Grammy awards, a beautiful thing happened…Something that helped reassure my faith in humanity and the music industry.
In the midst of Pop, Hip Hop and Indie artists/bands sat a petite upright bass player with big hair and an even bigger
Image via Wikipedia
voice. Esperanza Spalding, a jazz musician, took home a Best New Artist Grammy Award. Granted, she’s not the first such artist to win (Norah Jones hit it back in ’02 with an album that was loosely considered Jazz) but she is truest Jazz artist to take this award in a long time. This is exciting for Jazz.
What this means for Jazz is all these cats that flock to the mainstream artists like Drake and Bieber have now been exposed
to an artistic and expressive form of music that is generally overlooked by popular media. Yes, of course, Jazz musicians
and composers win Grammys every year but this one hit dead center of a cluster of great, popular artists. A lot of cats are hating on Spalding because she “stole” the award from Bieber, Drake, Mumford and Sons, or Florence and the Machine (depending on their tastes) and the buzz on Twitter was “who is Esperanza Spalding?” In fact, she was a Trending Topic. By now, hundreds of thousands of people have found out who she is and have been exposed, introduced, or reintroduced to Jazz.
[...] single album, for that matter). Sure, it will peak interest in other jazz artists (Just like when Esperanza won Best New Artist and Bublé beat Bieber) but that kind of expectations on one artist is not fair to the genre or [...]