Bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding is a Grammy-winning performer with an ambitiously cross-pollinated approach to contemporary jazz. Hailed as a prodigy in her teens, she garnered wider attention in the 2000s with the release of her debut, Junjo, and its follow-up, Esperanza, the latter of which topped the contemporary jazz charts. In 2010, she won Best New Artist at the Grammys, an accolade that helped propel her third album, Chamber Music Society, into the Billboard Top 40 as the best-selling contemporary jazz album that year. At the same time, Spalding won respect as a teacher, becoming the youngest faculty member at the Berklee College of Music. She took home a second Grammy for 2012’s Radio Music Society. Spalding has remained a forward-thinking maverick artist, issuing a series of increasingly concept-driven albums, including 2016’s Emily’s D+Evolution, 2019’s Twelve Little Spells, and 2021’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, all of which found her moving far afield of jazz into art rock, R&B, Afro-Latin styles, neo-prog, and experimental pop. Still, intimate and artfully rendered standards and post-bop jazz remain a core of her musical identity as on her 2023 duo album with Fred Hersch, Alive at the Village Vanguard.