Esperanza Spalding is bringing her career full circle this weekend, performing a retrospective show in a stripped-down trio format at City Winery Boston on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. The bassist, singer and composer with deep local roots is using the run to look back at a catalog that spans Grammy-winning jazz records, an opera written with Wayne Shorter, and a genre-crossing collaboration with Brazilian icon Milton Nascimento.
The shows land at a venue built for exactly this kind of close-up performance. As reported by the Boston Herald, City Winery Boston, located at 80 Beverly Street in the West End near North Station, seats roughly 300 guests in a cabaret-style room suited to intimate sets, according to City Winery Boston. That scale gives Spalding room to strip her material down and revisit it in front of an audience that has followed her since her Berklee days. According to the City of Boston, the large redevelopment of the North Station-Boston Garden area, a 1.87-million-square-foot mixed-use development, was approved in 2013.
According to the Mass Cultural Council, Massachusetts arts and culture generated $2.3 billion in annual economic activity. The Mass Cultural Council has offered project grants of up to $10,000 for small music venues to enhance or improve the live music experience.
Spalding's ties to Boston run deep. After graduating from Berklee College of Music in 2005, she was hired as an instructor there at age 20, making her one of the youngest faculty members in the school's history, per Berklee College of Music. She later spent six years as a professor at Harvard University starting in 2017, a tenure the Herald's report frames around her using the position as an incubator for ambitious projects.
An Academic Chapter That Ended Over a Curriculum Fight
At Harvard, Spalding conceived ambitious projects during her time as a professor, and one of them, the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, explored the healing potential of music, combining composition with research into therapeutic sound, according to Harvard Magazine. Spalding has said she wanted to connect health sciences and public health work with schools in the Boston area, and that curriculum design was a powerful way to gain understanding about that, the Herald reports.
That academic chapter did not end cleanly. Willamette Week reports that Spalding resigned from her Harvard post in 2022 after the university declined her proposed decolonial educational curriculum initiative, closing out a five-year run that had begun in 2017. It's a detail that underscores a recurring theme in her career: a pull between institutional academia and independent, experimental work that answers to no syllabus or department.
From a 77-Hour Livestream to a Grammy-Nominated Duet Record
Spalding has never been shy about unconventional formats. In September 2017, she created, arranged and recorded an entire album during an uninterrupted 77-hour livestream broadcast directly from the studio, a feat noted by the Herald's retrospective. More recently, she ventured into Brazilian music on a Grammy-nominated album made with Milton Nascimento, released by Concord Records on August 9, 2024, after recording sessions in Brazil throughout 2023, blending songs written by both artists.
That record, Milton + esperanza, arrived August 9, 2024, through Concord Records and picked up a Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy nomination that November, according to Concord Records. Spalding has said she and Nascimento shared a complementary wavelength and musical resonance, and the 16-track project, recorded in Brazil, also folded in surprise covers of Beatles and Michael Jackson songs alongside guest turns from Paul Simon, Dianne Reeves and Lianne La Havas, per Shore Fire Media.
An Opera Written With Wayne Shorter, Staged in Boston
Spalding also cowrote an opera with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, writing the libretto and starring as the title character in (Iphigenia), which reimagined Euripides' Greek tragedy with set designs by architect Frank Gehry. The work premiered in 2021.
That premiere came a decade after Spalding made history in 2011 as the first jazz musician to win the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, beating out pop and rock nominees including Justin Bieber, Drake and Florence + The Machine, per Jazzfuel. As of late 2024, she has earned five career Grammy Awards from 12 nominations, including Best Jazz Vocal Album wins for Radio Music Society in 2013, 12 Little Spells in 2020, and Songwrights Apothecary Lab in 2022.
What Comes After the Retrospective
Spalding has said everybody does that, referring to the impulse to look backward before moving forward, and she's framing this City Winery run as exactly that kind of pause. She plans to take a break after these shows to make her next album, one built from an inquiry into music and dance that she has pursued for six years.
She has said the upcoming project will not simply be an album of music that people can dance to, but will retain her musical identity while building a conceptual project about the relationship between music and dance. Describing the scope of that idea, Spalding has said the boundaries are encompassed by all of the people within, so it stretches with every single one of us.
Boston audiences catching Spalding this weekend are getting a rare vantage point: a hometown-adjacent artist pausing mid-career to survey a catalog built across genres, institutions and continents before turning toward whatever comes next. Her earlier headlining turn at the Chicago Jazz Festival and her 2019 set at the 50th anniversary Concord Jazz Festival are part of that same arc, one that keeps circling back through the city where she got her start.
