‘Milton + esperanza’ Soars Over Generations and Continents

On a video chat, every time esperanza spalding laughs, she coughs. “Sorry,” she says, from Cleveland, wrapping up a residency with the Off-Brand gOdds dance company she co-directs. “I’m recovering from a respiratory thing.”

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But there are a lot of laughs. And a lot of coughs. She can’t help herself. She’s talking about her friendship with Milton Nascimento and about making their new collaborative album, Milton + esperanza, a triumphant cross-generational and cross-hemispheric pairing of the 81-year-old Brazilian music giant and the 39-year-old, Oregon-born leader of a new jazz generation. Laughs are going to happen.

Like when she’s telling of how they came to record a very loose, playful, jazzy version of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”

“He’s obsessed with Paul McCartney,” the bassist-singer-composer says of Nascimento, not just McCartney’s contemporary age-wise, but in the world of modern Brazilian popular music a figure of McCartney-level stature.

“He knows more about Paul McCartney than Paul McCartney knows. We were trying to get Paul McCartney to guest on the record to fulfill Milton’s lifelong dream.”

They didn’t, sadly. “He’s only met him once and never got to work with him. So we’re looking through this book of lyrics and songs ‘cause he’s trying to remember this song. He know all about it—‘It was written this year… John Lennon did this part…’ and I’m just, ’Oh, my God, what?’

Laugh. Cough.

“But he couldn’t remember the name of the song,” says spalding, who produced the album. “Finally we went page by page through the book, and it was, yes, ‘A Day in the Life.’ We had heard it but we weren’t familiar with playing it. So in the studio we figured out the key and just started doing it. We thought it’s gonna sound crazy if we start singing, ‘Got up, got out of bed…’ ‘That’s gonna sound corny! We can’t!’ But Milton wanted to do it. And I remember the moment, we were like, ‘Let’s just yell it.’ It has to sound messy. It was like, ‘We love Milton, so if this is what he says he wants to do, we’re gonna find a way to do it that we feel like we can put our name on it.’ What you hear is that process.”

Or when she tells of a wild day in which Nascimento hosted a barbecue at his Rio home with 79-year-old Brazilian star composer-arranger Arthur Verocai and the Canadian jazz group BADBADNOTGOOD among the guests. Also there was S?o Paulo star Tim Bernardes, whom she took up to Nascimento’s TV room to record a vocal for the song “Saudade Dos Avi?es Da Panair (Conversando No Bar),” which also features Lianne La Havas.

Or the day she was there working on overdubs and British flute-sax player Shabaka Hutchings just happened to be in town, and same for pianist Leo Genovese, one of her regular bandmates whom she had no idea was going to be there. After having them each add parts to some songs, Hutchings and his partner all went to see concerts by Brazilian superstars Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, and Djavan in the same night.

“It was an insane night. I’m there with Shabaka and his partner, and we’re just like, ‘What is this life? Who are we? Where are we?’”

And again she laughs. And coughs.

“It’s kind of a blur,” she says, describing her frequent visits to Brazil to make this album between other recording and performing commitments. “It was so much for a whole year. It was a lot of that, what I just described, all year long. It was crazy!”

That’s all in the album, that fun wrapped in music of depth and heart, of reach and ambition, not just a combination of the two remarkable talents at its center, but also the product of a friendship, a chemistry, a bond that led to new heights for both. And that means some serious heights.

Nascimento stands as a pillar of what has been dubbed MPB—música popular brasileira—alongside Antonio Carlos Jobim, Elis Regina, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil. But  really he’s virtually a genre unto himself, with his vast talents as a honey-voiced singer in his prime and a composer reaching into pop, jazz, Afro-Brazilian, and classical styles, including cherished collaborations with such vaunted figures as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Hancock and Shorter also served as mentors and friends for spalding, too, in her wide-reaching and much-acclaimed quest to create without boundaries on her own terms.

That laugh—without the coughs—is heard in several places throughout the album, as is Nascimento’s, the two of them together in bits of chatter serving as preludes and interludes. On one titled “outro planeta” (“Another Planet”) near the album’s end, they laugh together, heartily, while marveling at the music created by some other, unnamed, artist. “He’s not from here,” Nascimento says, but then turns philosophical:

“I try to sing,” he says, somberly, in accented English over atmospheric music created by Justin Tyson. “But when I play guitar, I think what will be the song itself—the music, the violins, the orchestra, the seeds, the trees, everything? The music for me is basically friendship, love, children, ocean, the life.”

“I wanted to include that because it’s so special,” spalding says. “In general he’s a very reserved person. And I wanted that jubilant part of his personality to be felt and heard. He is such an enigma to all of us! And I just wanted him to talk about music in his own voice instead of the analysis of other people. And I love how devastatingly simple his approach and outlook is.”

That chatter leads to the set’s closing track and, in many ways, spiritual/emotional core: a nine-minute interpretation of “When You Dream,” written by Wayne Shorter, who died last year, featuring Shorter’s widow Carolina on vocals alongside the two of them.

The song gave them difficulties, spalding says, with various attempts at arrangements not clicking.

“Then I thought of Wayne, the character, and I was like, ‘We had to do this. We need to do this,’” she says. “So we just went into the booth. We did that song in two takes. We did it from the beginning to the middle, and then realized we didn’t know where to go after that. So we stopped and then, ‘Okay, let’s just pick it up from the middle.’ And then when we finished it, of course we were crying. But we were just totally up. I remember Wayne talking about when you play, you should be having fun.”

Adding Carolina Shorter’s voice to the mix gave it another emotional dimension.

“When I texted Carolina asking if she would sing, she didn’t respond right away,” spalding says. “And when she did, it was just all exclamation points, crying emojis, heart emojis. She said, ‘You don’t understand. One of the last things Wayne said to me is, ‘Carolina, you have to sing. I want you to sing. People need to hear your voice.’ She felt that it was all Wayne’s doing, like a big set-up just to get her to sing.”

The presence of Wayne Shorter can be felt throughout the album, he having been a friend and collaborator of both of these artists. Nascimento was featured on Shorter’s Brazilian-rooted 1975 album Native Dancer and the two became close, working together often. Spalding, in turn, was transported when she first heard that album at a friend’s dinner party and became a Nascimento super-fan. Eventually the two were introduced via mutual friend Hancock, Nascimento singing on one song of spalding’s breakthrough 2010 album, Chamber Music Society. She also became close to Shorter, among other things co-writing one of his last and most ambitious works, the opera Iphigenia.

So the Milton + esperanza pairing was a natural.

“Basically his son asked me to produce a record for his dad,” she says. “‘It should be you and him, Milton and esperanza, produced by you.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, yes!’ And then he was like, ‘But you need to do it now because his voice is so warmed up from this tour and after the tour he is not going to be singing as much.’ And I’m like, ‘When?’ And he’s like, ‘As soon as you can.’ Okay.”

The haste, the serendipity, the craziness of it all only served in their favor, it seems. The album covers a lot of ground. If the casual “A Day in the Life” stands on one end and the fully realized “When You Dream” on the other, in between is a wealth of wonder: There are several remakes of Nascimento classics (1967’s “Morro Velho,” 1969’s “Outubro,” and 1972’s “Cais” among them), richer and more powerful now for the time passed and the deepened tone of his voice.

There are guest appearances drawn from generations of influence and friendships. Paul Simon, singing in Portuguese, appears on “Um Vento Passou (para Paul Simon),” which, as the title indicates, Nascimento wrote with him in mind, the two having first sung together decades ago. Jazz queen Dianne Reeves helps transform Michael Jackson’s somewhat trite “Earth Song” into a heartfelt, urgent plea. And there are several new compositions by Nascimento and spalding.

One emotional highlight is “Saci,” a new version of a 1993 Nascimento song, here in duet with his contemporary, Brazilian star Guinga, astonishingly the first time they’ve ever performed together. And there is spalding’s new “Wings for the Thought Bird,” which starts with her exquisitely mimicking bird songs and features a full orchestra as well as Carolina Shorter chanting a Buddhist prayer.

The album’s brightest treats are when spalding’s and Nascimento’s voices play off each other—his now-low rumble coming up from the earth, her clear high tones floating down from the clouds. At one point, Nascimento holds a note for what would be an impressive length for someone a third of his age. Other times his voice cracks and fades. The latter speaks profoundly to spalding.

“It’s okay if it’s a little gravelly,” she says. “It’s okay if he kind of runs out of breath. He is 81. You get to hear an 81-year-old sound like himself and just give you his all.”

And that was spalding’s mission, to give Nascimento a victory lap worthy of his legacy, honoring the generous spirit and the fierce daring that have marked his life. For longtime fans, Milton + esperanza might evoke Nascimento’s Clube da Esquina albums, two bold 1970s sets for which he reconvened the 1960s ad-hoc music and arts collective (the name means “Corner Club,” for its streets origins) that launched several significant careers, his most prominently.

The young man of that clube is still, clearly, in him today, spalding having given him fertile ground to flourish. So is Milton + esperanza in some ways Clube da Esquina 3?

“Oh, my gosh!” spalding says, eyes widening. “I have to say no out of respect for what their consortium and collective was. I have to say absolutely no! They were friends and co-conspirators. He tells stories of how they were roommates, some of those guys. And they would just make music all day and all night and get into trouble together and then go make songs about it. And then just do random gigs to pay the bills and songs would come out of those. Those portraits or relationships, you know, it’s the music. The music is the portrait of their relationship.”

She thinks for a second.

“I guess I could say the way it’s related is I really let this album come into shape as a portrait of the relationship of everybody involved,” she says.

But really it’s a portrait of the two of them, shown beautifully on the album cover, their heads close. Still, she shakes her head as she tries to grasp her fortune of being his friend, of getting to create music with him. He, she says, might also be one of those beings from an outro planeta.

“It looks like they’re doing the same things everybody’s doing, but for some reason other things are coming out,” she says. “Milton, he’s like a species. It’s like, why do passion flowers look that way?”

She laughs and coughs.

“That’s how they look! They’re always going to grow that way. That’s what they give us.”

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