Bassist, vocalist and composer Esperanza Spalding first met choreographer Alonzo King during San Francisco Symphony’s 2021-22 season when she performed Wayne Shorter’s “Gaia” and his troupe Alonzo King Lines Ballet danced Alberto Ginastera’s “Estancia Suite.”
“That was an auspicious place to meet where we’re both bringing our beauty, gifts and medicine in support of another institution after COVID,” Spalding says of the symphony’s first full concert after the pandemic. “That was when I first found out about Alonzo King and experienced his work, and I was like, that’s what’s real and what matters in the world.”
That interaction sparked their interest in collaborating and resulted in “Legacy—The Immeasurable Immensity of Your Inheritance.” The piece, featuring Spalding in performance, premieres in Alonzo King Lines Ballet’s spring season on April 11-19 in San Francisco’s Blue Shield of California Theater. The show also includes a reprise of King’s meditative tribute “Ode to Alice Coltrane.”
Spalding, a five-time Grammy Award winner including Best New Artist in 2011, made history as the first jazz artist ever to receive that honor. Yet her compositions aren’t strictly jazz; she incorporates classical, funk, R&B and experimental music.
When Spalding met King, she had just collaborated with legendary jazz saxophonist Shorter (1933-2023) on his improvisation-heavy jazz opera “Iphigenia,” which premiered in 2021 at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. That work influenced how she wrote, and performs, in “Legacy.”
“I’m learning a lot on this journey about improvisation, like facets of its efficacy and presence that I didn’t know about before,” she says. “And I’m learning a lot in the comments where music is not pre-written. I’m finding so much dialogue, even when a dancer is moving with choreography that is known and that they’ve practiced. Just easing into the ocean together of simultaneous spontaneity and co-composition in places.”
Spalding says she feels the presence of influential artists like Shorter and Coltrane (1937-2007): “Wayne and Alice offered that practice as a spiritual salve and as a technology for these depths of our soul to be in dialogue together in space. I am really grateful for their willingness and curiosity with me to see what we can conjure or call into some of these moments; it really feels like everything in the world is happening in this piece.”
“Legacy” marks the first time Spalding has composed a score in collaboration with a dance company. The native of Portland, Oregon found inspiration for the work in her home state. She says, “The first thing I did to compose this piece was I went to this land in rural Oregon that I have a very deep relationship with, and I brought my bass and recording here. I started on the land. It was silent out there with beautiful light. I sent Alonzo a photo where I was recording from and said, ‘I don’t know where this is going to go, but I know the origin of it should come from the land…. ’”
For Spalding, the connection between dance and music, particularly jazz, has been inextricable, if at times threatened, in history.
“Dance is the archive of everything in our lineages, and the dancing bodies, in the lineage of jazz music specifically, served as this very explicit archive in that,” she says. “People were forbidden from playing their rhythms, stories and songs on the drums. And so the dancing body became the subversive archive. And these rhythms could travel intact through time, through generations, until they could come back out through the jazz drum kit.”
Spalding calls the pairing of her new piece with “Ode to Alice Coltrane” unexpected yet welcome. She says, “I really appreciate that as a Black femme jazz creator just the reminder that I’m definitely in the lineage of Alice Coltrane. … She’s a person who I’ve looked to many times to remember what I’m doing, even though what I’m doing is so different.”
Alonzo King Lines Ballet appears at 7:30 p.m. April 11, April 15 and April 17; 5 p.m. April 12 and April 19; and 2 p.m. April 18 in the Blue Shield of California Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., San Francisco. Tickets ($46-$149) at linesballet.org
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