For the premiere episode of Rogue Presents on Pelicola.tv, we sat down with Esperanza Spalding, the 25-year-old bassist, vocalist, and composer whose music has challenged and redefined the common perceptions of what jazz is

Watch this episode of Rogue|Presents exclusively on Pelicola.tv.

How do you think did growing up in a multi-lingual household and neighborhood in Portland, Oregon affect you?
Wow, maybe just getting used to many different perspectives on anything, on everything. The way that translates to the musical realm is that when you get to a place like the college I went to (Berklee College of Music) or a city like New York, all the people around you—with all their various ethnicities, languages, cultures, music, approaches—they all seem accessible, they all seem valuable, very valuable, in the sense that you can absorb them and learn from them and incorporate them to the work that you do.

I learned that your mother raised you single-handedly. What were the memorable lessons that you learned from her?
Oh man, there are so many lessons that anyone can learn from a mother or a father who can manage to raise their children alone—that’s a mighty feat. Many people do it. I think the biggest lesson is consistency and diligence. For my mother, there was never a time to stop—you always have to go. There was always something to be done, always someone to be helped or served or taught or taken to school. And then there were activities, and there was the house to take care of, and then there’s work. So I guess I was instilled with a very strong work ethic. And taking things very seriously—there’s nothing more serious than raising a child, and she put that first. So that might be the lesson there—how to use your time effectively for something other than your own personal pursuits. Her pursuit was to make sure that I had a good life, and that’s very humbling to see.

You were home-schooled for quite a while in your elementary years. Surely there must have been an effect on your character. How did this affect the way you moved inside traditional learning environments?
I’m sure being home-schooled did a lot of things to me, in terms of how I approached school. I don’t really know how to analyze it from the outside, you know—most people just kind of do what they do, not very conscious of how their history affects it. But home-schooling is interesting. Most people who’ve been home-schooled worked very closely with their parents most of the time, but my parent was gone most of the time, so perhaps the way that it influenced me the most was acquiring the awareness that there was something that had to be completed at a certain time, and the only one that was gonna complete it was me, and there was no one there to help me, and I knew I was capable of doing it ‘cause it was appropriate for my age. So it just boiled down to doing the work and disciplining myself. That’s kind of the same way I approach things now: the key to everything is preparation.

What particular instance in your childhood do you think formed you the most to become who you are right now?
The turning point in my childhood, in terms of music, which is now—other than my family—is the most important thing in my life, was an episode that I saw of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a children’s program, and I saw Yo-Yo Ma (a Chinese-American virtuoso cellist) perform and I said, Wow, what is that? And that’s when I started harassing my mom about music. So that was probably the most influential moment just because it whet my appetite for music, and that’s carried me to where I am today and it’s gonna carry me up much further.

You not only sing and play bass at the same time, you also do a sort of interpretative dance as you play. Why? What provokes you to move?
I don’t know how to speak about that ‘cause I don’t know that from the inside out. I don’¬t know—I tap my feet to some rhythm—I don’t know if it’s the right rhythm, but to a rhythm. And the necessary movements to make the sound I wanna make and react to the sound that’s coming in may come across as an interpretative dance, but that’s not the intention. I guess playing music is kinda like an interpretative dance—so if you wanna be very ethereal in speaking about it, we’re all dancing up there when we play.

You were the second youngest professor in the history of the Berklee College of Music. Talk about teaching young talents. What do you get from it?
It’s interesting to have to look at music from an angle where you’re not explaining it to yourself. Now you’re trying to explain musical concepts that you kind of take for granted and find new information to help other people prepare for their own personal journeys. It’s a very different focus ‘cause as an individual musician, when you’re teaching yourself, it’s all about your objective and what you know and what you think you need to cultivate your music. All of sudden, you’re giving all that energy and all that creativity on how to discover the appropriate tools to prepare for someone else’s benefit. It takes your creative energy to a very different place. I think it’s very healthy.

Whenever you hear your talents associated with the word “prodigy,” how do you feel?
Well, I feel like whoever said that shouldn’t put those two words together, ‘cause the word prodigy implies someone with an uncanny ability for their age, for their experience. In my case, I wasn’¬t a prodigy when I was a kid—I was just a kid who liked playing music, I just did it all the time. I don’t think any of my teachers thought I was very exemplary, you know, at least they didn’t tell me. I just really dug it, and I kind of always thought music was a lot easier than people telling me it was. (Laughs.) I mean, I wasn’t very good at it when I was little but I always thought it was a lot simpler, so I would never really do what people told me to do, which I dunno if that helped or hurt. And so now, to look at what I’m doing now, and then if you think that I’m a prodigy, you have to remember that it’s been 20 years—an accumulative process of music and studying music and listening to music and delving into it and sitting with it at home and all of the various little things that I’ve done over the years to satisfy my personal hunger, my personal goals. It was 20 years in the making, you know, and I think that somebody my age should be at a very proficient level of playing his or her instrument. It’s expected, I think. I don’t think that it should be, Oh wow! I just have to be better if I’ve been playing for 20 years, you know. Music is accumulative and 20 years is a long time to be pursuing it, that’s why I don’t necessarily think the word “prodigy” is very applicable to my story.

A lot of critics—and musicians themselves—believe that much of today’s popular music has an increasingly manufactured feel, jazz included. How can one identify what is real and raw and what is not?
Well, you know, it’s tricky to speak about that ‘cause there’s really no cut and dry answer. I mean, I’ve listened to music that is technically produced—meaning the artist or the singer or the performer didn’t write the music, didn’t produce the record; someone else may have told him what to do and what to sing—and I felt something deep from that artist, and I can’t really justify why. Because from a distance, you could see that the song sucks—it’s so plastic—but then it really moved me. On the other hand, I could listen to a musician that studied jazz and saxophone for decades, and I don’t feel anything—it feels contrived. So I don’t know. I think this is like the question, What is good and bad music? I think it’s very personal to begin with. But probably the only element that is consistent to what you’d call raw and real music is sincerity. I think that’s something that can’t be hidden, even in manufactured music. A very sincere artist can get caught up with a really pop-oriented producer, but I think the sincerity will still come through. Music has the right to go through different phases¬—maybe right now all of popular music is based on a sound, but that’s okay. And maybe right now marketability and profit are the main driving factors behind the music that gets played on the radio, and that’s okay, too. It has a natural evolution. It’s there because it works for somebody¬. And listeners and musicians and businesses would have to hash through this period to get to whatever is the next stage—it just means we’re working to something that’s much more idealistic and more raw and closer to the heart.

Why music? Why are you doing what you are doing now?
Well, why are you doing what you’re doing right now?

Because it’s interesting.
There you go. Why? Why not? (Laughs.) Why are you there behind the camera? You know, we end up where we end up. And I think instead of having some auspicious goal and then finding the lifestyle that meets it, I think it’s the other way around—something attracts us to a lifestyle and to a career and a pursuit and within that we search for whatever we’re searching for. So I dunno. Music happened, music came into my life, and that’s what I became. Why not? Why not music? I dunno. That’s what I do.

Watch this episode of Rogue|Presents exclusively on Pelicola.tv.