ESPERANZA SPALDING

Esperanza Spalding won a Grammy award for Best New Artist. She grew up in the King neighborhood of Portland Oregon that she describes as the “ghetto” and “pretty scary”.Esperanza and her brother were raised by their mother. When Esperanza was four years old she was inspired to pursue a life in music while watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and classical cellist YoYo Ma. 

At the age of five Esperanza taught herself to play the violin and she started playing with the Chamber Music Society of Oregon. Esperanza stayed with the Chamber Music Society until she was fifteen and left as a concertmaster. Esperanza is a self taught musician, she also plays the oboe and the clarinet, but her love is the bass. Esperanza says discovering the bass was like "waking up one day and realizing you’re in love with a co-worker."

At the age of 15 or 16 Esperanza wrote lyrics for a local rock/pop band Noise for Pretend and started doing vocals for them. Esperanza’s vocal style is jazzy with a scanting quality about it.

Esperanza attended Berklee College of Music, but found it hard to meet living expenses even though she had a full scholarship. Esperanza started to give up music and go into political science; but jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny told Esperanza she had “the X Factor” and that she could make it if she applied herself. Esperanza toured with Patti Austin for three years and saxophonist Joe Lovano while attending Berklee. Esperanza was awarded the Boston Jazz Society scholarship for outstanding musicianship in 2005. That same year she was the first ever youngest professor in the institutions history, at the age of 20.

 I had not heard of Esperanza Spalding until she won the Grammy for Best New Artist. It is great that she won beating out the other artist in that category, Justin Beiber. To have a real musician who can play an instrument and sing in my opinion is great.

I hope the people who vote for the nominees realize that it’s not always about popularity. Esperanza Spalding is a great Jazz musician and singer and we will be hearing a lot more from her for years to come.


LM

http://wiki.ask.com/Esperanza_Spalding

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-rWNAQx1ZE

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Groove 55 “En Route” Now Playing on Streetwise Radio

Groove 55 presents its new release “En Route”, an uptempo smooth jazz album, foot-tapping, rhythm blended & steeped in rich harmonic original melodies!

Collectively, the four band members bring decades of music experience to the project having worked with Oliver Jones, Gregory Charles, & Zachary Richard to name but a few. So it seems almost fitting that they would come together as a unified collective to share in their many years of creative experience and knowledge to create “En Route”.

The Groove 55 members, all very talented esteemed musicians, consists of Yves Adam (alto, tenor & soprano sax) a graduate of McGill’s music faculty in jazz performance as well as teaching saxophone at The Montreal International Jazz festival Blues Camp. Jacques Mignault (Rhodes, piano, clavinet, synths)studied alongside Art Roberts at Montreal’s Concordia University, he would later go on to win the inaugural grand prize of the Roland Synthesizer music contest among hundred’s of entrants spanning over 22 countries that was judged by the late great Oscar Peterson. Yves Nadeau (bass) is a veteran of the Montreal Jazz scene, having played hundred’s of shows on stages all over Quebec with his bands Solstice & Expresso. Rounding out the Montreal quartet is Jacques Gagne (drums) he himself well known and ensconced early on with some of the biggest TV shows in Quebec and on the touring scene – Together they make up Groove 55 the number that has the remarkable property of being the 10th number of the Fibonacci suite and is the sum of the numbers 1 to 10…..The most important part is it’s groove and this band has it in spades with their new release “EnRoute”!

Our MySpace group page is at: www.myspace.com/groove55jazz