SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB Esperanza Spalding

• 1Formwela 103:35
• 2Formwela 206:10
• 3Formwela 307:03
• 4Formwela 404:18
• 5Formwela 503:33
• 6Formwela 603:08
• 7Formwela 703:26
• 8Formwela 811:39
• 9Formwela 904:31
• 10Formwela 1003:28
• 11Formwela 1103:08
• 12Formwela 1306:44
• Total Runtime01:00:43

Info for SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB

speranza spalding releases her new album SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB. SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB features 12 pieces of music, created and recorded over the past several months in her traveling laboratory, in collaboration with a host of musicians, researchers and practitioners. Each song was designed to have an intended effect for the listener, from grounding yourself in a moment of chaos and de-escalating interpersonal aggression to addressing the feelings of grief and loneliness brought on by the pandemic.

The Songwrights Apothecary Lab is a curated portal of new work that is growing out of spalding’s collaborative practice over the past years, exploring how songwriters might meaningfully incorporate therapeutic practices and knowledge into their process and production. The researchers and practitioners that partook in the labs specialize in fields ranging from neuroscience and music therapy to psychology and ethnomusicology.

Pitchfork describes spalding’s recent work as “a vessel for boundless creativity and experimentalism” and her 2018 album 12 Little Spells earned her a 4th GRAMMY Award. In a profile that ran in April, around the release of the TRIANGLE suite crafted and released via her Songwrights Apothecary Lab, she told the New York Times: “What we want to do is hear what people are wishing for from the music, like, what do you need? It’s an invitation to hear what you need a song for, and then that informs what we look for in our research, in our investigation.”

spalding even invited the public into the creative process, hosting a series of nightly presentations following a day of writing and recording. This took place over 10 days in June, when she set up her Songwrights Apothecary Lab in New York City. The second half of the album, “Formwela’s 7-13,” were all created and recorded then, and feature a mix of music that is intended to be both soothing and jarring. On these six pieces, esperanza is joined by drummer Francisco Mela, pianist Leo Genovese, guitarist Matthew Stevens, and saxophonist Aaron Burnett.

Earlier iterations of the lab took place in Wasco County, Oregon, and Portland, Oregon - where the first six pieces of music featured on the new album were created by spalding and include contributions from Wayne Shorter, Phoelix, Raphael Saadiq, Justin Tyson, Ganavya Doraiswamy and Corey King.

“The well of this interdisciplinary mode of music creation is deep. we dip and dip and draw and draw and pour the best of what we find into each Formwela…,” says spalding.

Esperanza Spalding
“Ms. Spalding is still enamored of Wayne Shorter’s harmonic depth and Stevie Wonder’s melodic lift, but her frame of reference has broadened in salutary ways: ‘Funk Your Fear’ ha(s) the serpentine gnarl of a Funkadelic anthem, and ‘Noble Nobles’ brazenly evoke(s) Hejira-era Joni Mitchell.”--NY Times

“...a fresh artistic vision for the four-time Grammy winner, a daring tapestry of music, vibrant imagery, performance art and stage design.”--Ebony

“Emily’s D+Evolution is more than a recording project, it’s an awakening of her inner child. It’s an audio portrait stretching Spalding beyond music and into storytelling through acting, staging, and movement.”--Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls

Seven collaborative and five solo albums into her career at 31, Esperanza Spalding has always resolutely, intuitively, deftly expanded upon both her art and herself as a world-renowned genre- bending composer, bassist and vocalist. Spalding’s work, grounded in jazz traditions but never bound by them, has won her four Grammy awards and brought her onstage at the Oscars, the Nobel Prize Ceremony, the White House, and with Prince and Herbie Hancock. Not only does she know who she is, we know who she is.

Or, rather, we think we do. The elastic self and work of a true artist is always changing; ideas are channeled, shape-shifting becomes necessary. Emily’s D+Evolution (pronounced “d plus evolution”) is where we meet Emily--both Esperanza’s middle name and the label for the spirit- muse that flows through this multi-dimensional, theatrical performance artwork wrapped in a brilliantly urgent, vivacious record. With 6 tracks co-produced by Tony Visconti (David Bowie) and drawing, at times, from wellsprings as disparate as Cream to Shostakovich to St. Vincent, Emily’s D+Evolution is a kaleidoscopic project; raw, honest, luminous.

"Whether you want to see it as devolution and evolution, and the place where they co-exist without one diminishing the other, or...barely having the tools that you need, but having to move forward, and having to keep moving," Spalding explained to NPR in a recent interview, the album conceptually addresses the always exciting, sometimes messy process of reconciling the aspects of our selves that are in conflict. Exploding with literal and proverbial electricity, this album’s complex but immediate compositions were committed to tape partially live, and partially in front of a control room packed full of 20 or more onlookers. The trio of Spalding (fretless electric bass and vocals), Matthew Stevens (electric guitar) and Justin Tyson and Karriem Riggins (splitting drum duties) often decided to use the first take--a testament to the project’s particular energy and Spalding’s virtuosity. Many of the compositions on Emily’s D+Evolution were, after all, incubated onstage during the rigorous live performance schedule that preceded it.

Armed with the entity of Emily flowing through her, Spalding’s visionary performance of the album is an experience to behold and an integral part of the project itself. Here, Spalding is, for the first time, incorporating stage design, movement and acting into her already vivid musical storytelling practice. She’s working with stage director and playwright Will Wiegler to manifest her concepts physically now that they’ve come to life aurally. Each track on the album, from the soaring ode to uninhibited self-expression “Good Lava” to the affecting, shimmery funk ballad “Unconditional Love”, Emily’s D+Evolution is rich, surprising and labyrinthian, yet classic and timeless, as if these songs have always existed out there in the ether. Turns out that Spalding just had to tune in to Emily to bring them here to Earth.

This album contains no booklet.