Esperanza Spalding
MYS is proud to welcome barrier-breaking five-time Grammy winner and Portland native esperanza spalding for its season finale.
MYS is commissioning a piece by esperanza spalding for bass, voice, and symphony, exploring the connection between the land and spirit. esperanza will perform the new work with MYS Symphony Orchestra and jazz students, along with Ebony and Ivy by esperanza spalding, and Midnight in Carlotta’s Hair by the great Wayne Shorter.
In honor of another barrier breaker, MYS will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 4, one of her most substantial symphonies. Composed in 1945, this work was never performed during Price’s life and was presumed lost until 2009, when it was rediscovered in her former summer home in Illinois. Price’s Symphony No. 4 received its world premiere by the Fort Smith Symphony on May 12, 2018.
MYS is no stranger to Price’s work. In 2019, Symphony Orchestra performed the U.S. West Coast premiere of Price’s Symphony No. 1, and took this piece abroad in Italy and Austria as part of its international tour that same summer.
About esperanza spalding
Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, esperanza spalding (a.k.a. irma nejando) is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American (masculine) jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves through various combinations of instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land & artist-sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, friend, while collaboratively decolonizing within and through her hometown community. She co-founded and serves as lead curator for Prismid Sanctuary, a non-profit that creates and stewards artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon.
esperanza continues to collaborate and perform in new productions of “…(Iphigenia)”, an opera written by Wayne Shorter, for whom she wrote the libretto and co-produced its 2021/2022 premieres // is currently developing a mockumentary in collaboration with brontë velez and San Francisco Symphony // researching and developing liberation rituals in jazz and black dance // and through the Songwrights Apothecary Lab continuing a lifelong collaboration with practitioners in various fields relating to sound, healing, and cognition to develop music with enhanced therapeutic potential.
With her dance company Off Brand gOdds (co-founded with Antonio Brown) and the Songwrights Apothecary Lab she leads multi-week performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas, and throughout the world.
Her forthcoming installation “I love being Black/Quit saying I’m Black” opens in a near future, commissioned and produced by institutions who do the work themselves of learning about, reaching out to, and offering comprehensive support to eaabibacliitoti (and other ancestored) artists rather than demanding we take on the burden of proving our competency and worthiness to receive the resources required to deliver our medicine – uncontorted & well-rested – to our communities/the world.
*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Lands of Turtle Island
Tickets are available on the Portland’5 website or in person at the Schnitzer Box Office which opens at 2 hours before the concert.