When Esperanza Spalding speaks about Emily’s D+Evolution, this summer’s tour which doubles as her most ambitious project to date, she keeps coming back to legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter and his three-word definition of jazz: I dare you.
In a 2013 interview with NPR, Shorter explained that the daring nature of jazz came from the genre’s lack of boundaries. “No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected,” he said. “How do you rehearse the unknown?”
It’s this sense of compelling unpredictability that has permeated Spalding’s entire career from her being hired as a bass instructor at Berklee College of Music at the tender age of 20 to her breakout record Chamber Music Society — her third studio album — which saw her win the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011, beating out competition such as Mumford and Sons, Florence and the Machine, Drake and Justin Bieber. (Her three subsequent Grammy wins were less of a surprise.)
Now, at 30, Spalding is at her most unpredictable. With Emily, a live show that sees Spalding combining her brand of contemporary jazz with elements of theater, poetry and video, even she doesn’t know what’s next.
“The project is evolving and devolving, so it may have become a different thing by the time we get to your city,” Spalding said, speaking via email ahead of her July 1 performance at Iron City.
When it was first announced, Spalding described Emily as a narrative that “unfolds as live musical vignettes.”
“This project is about going back and reclaiming un-cultivated curiosity, and using it as a compass to move forward and expand,” she said in a press release. “We will be staging the songs as much as we play them.”
There’s an element of theatricality inherent in the very name of the project itself: Emily is Spalding’s “fresh persona” directing the project’s musical explorations. Spalding is quick to clarify, though, that Emily is more than a character role or a Bowie-esque alter ego.
“I wouldn’t say she’s an alter ego,” she said. “My [middle] name is actually Emily. I’m just using my full name now. That’s how I see Emily in my life as an artist: [I’m] using my whole self now. Of course, I’m just a beginner at it, so there’s a lifetime’s worth of room to grow.”
Emily’s own growth has taken place over the course of two months (the tour kicked off on May 5 and will end in New Orleans on July 4) and has been driven by Spalding’s constant desire to move the project into new territory — though she insists that the directions in which it has moved have not been conscious ones.
“Oh man, I don’t have time to think about all that,” she said. “We just churn every day and dig for the next modification/expansion/change that’s going to improve the performance.”
Similarly, the inspiration for the project was less from one specific source than it was a culmination of influences she encountered during the album’s year-and-a-half germination.
Spalding, who describes herself as a “hopeless bookworm,” found some inspiration in the works of Ruth Krauss, a writer known for her popular children’s book The Carrot Seed as well as her experimental poetry, much of which was meant to be performed onstage.
“When I discovered Ruth Krauss’s poetry and her poem-plays, I knew anything was possible,” Spalding said. “And by anything, I literally mean anything. I didn’t fully know that before her.”
Musically, Spalding found her inspiration from a wider variety of sources. “I got really inspired musically after seeing the documentary Beware of Mr. Baker,” she said, referring to the 2012 Jay Bulger-directed film focusing on the life of Ginger Baker, the drummer for the influential rock band Cream whose style was often noted for its jazz influence.
“I was [also] inspired by things I heard in David Bowie and Joni Mitchell and Brian Blade’s Mama Rosa project,” Spalding said. “But this music certainly doesn’t sound like any of them. It sounds like me — Emily.”
“Everything is inspiration to me,” she added. “Just like it is to you, if you let it be.”
This appeal to the creative impulses of her audience also forms a central part of Spalding’s Emily project. In a video announcing the tour, Spalding encouraged audiences attending her shows to “feel what you want to feel, move how you want to move. Join us. Come as a character you’ve always wanted to be. We’re allowed to pretend to be ourselves.”
According to Spalding, the project is ultimately about the involvement of her audience. “Performance-wise, it’s about how many different ways you can tell stories and leave room for the listener to creatively participate in the ‘meaning’ of what you’re saying,” she said.
This fall, after the conclusion of the Emily tour, Spalding will release the project’s 12 songs in the form of her fifth studio album, which she says was recorded prior to the beginning of the tour.
“We recorded the album first, but didn’t have a label,” she said. “I was itching to get out and figure out how this thing I’d been dreaming up actually worked. For me, I can only figure that out in real time in front of real audiences.”
“So we’re sort of rolling this project out inside-out,” she added. “Usually, folks do a whole album release, then they tour to support it. I’m so grateful people have been willing to take a chance with me as I take a chance on this project. Again, like Wayne said, jazz means ‘I dare you.’”
Esperanza Spalding will bring Emily’s D+Evolution to Iron City on Wednesday, July 1. Doors will open at 7 p.m.; the show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets for the all-ages show are $30 in advance and $33 the day of the show. For more information, visit ironcitybham.com.