Milton + esperanza
When jazz bassist, singer, and composer esperanza spalding (she affects the lower case) first heard Brazilian music maestro Milton Nascimento, she was a student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He heard about her from keyboard legend Herbie Hancock. They have recorded together once before, on the track “Apple Blossom” from her 2010 album Chamber Music Society.
Milton + esperanza, their first longform collaboration, expresses mutual admiration and adventurism. He delves into his impressive back catalog, she contributes new songs, and they work amiably, even amorously, to find stylistic communion as they maintain their individual idiosyncrasies.
Professional craft guides every idiosyncrasy and polishes every moment of playfulness: spalding’s regular band, including pianist Leo Genovese and guitarist Matthew Stevens, gives a thoughtfully tasteful shine to Nascimento’s “Cais,” which dates back to 1972, and enhances the cunningly light R&B groove of spalding’s “Get It By Now.”
One of Nascimento’s friends, Paul Simon, duets with him on “Um Vento Passou (para Paul Simon),” and each gentleman finds considerable comfort in the other’s aging breath, while Dianne Reeves lends her mature passion to “Earth Song,” helping to remake Michael Jackson’s 1995 single as if stripping away the late man’s troubled existence to show only the pop brilliance.
Nascimento and spalding are less serious with the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” turning the middle of the song into an endearingly unexpected knees-up shout-along, and also wreathing its freakout finale in the smoke of some long-gone club that spalding’s forebears and Nascimento’s contemporaries might have inhabited.
Milton + esperanza ends with a felinely languid take on “When You Dream,” co-written by the recently departed saxophonist Wayne Shorter. This is apt, as it was Shorter’s collaboration with Nascimento, 1974’s Native Dancer, that caught spalding’s ears back at Berklee. Carolina, Wayne’s widow, adds her vocals as if sanctifying all the connections. Like spalding, like Nascimento, like the album, Carolina is filled with laughing grace.
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