Questions 21-30 are based on the following passage.
In 2008, the prodigiously gifted bassist, singer,
HUMANfflES: This passage is adapted from the article New Note: Esperanza Spalding's Music" by John Colapinto (©2010 by Cond6 Nast).
and composer Esperanza Spalding released her major-
label debut, Esperanza, which she recorded as a
twenty-three-year-old instructor at the Berklee College
5 of Music, in Boston. While the music was indisputably
jazz, it suggested an almost bewildering array of influ-
ences-fusion, funk, soul, rhythm and blues, Brazilian
samba and Cuban son, pop balladry, chanted vocalese--
with lyrics sung in Spalding's three languages: English,
10 Portuguese, and Spanish. An ebullient mash-up of
sounds, styles, and tongues, the record seemed like
something new-jazz for the iPod age-and it rose
quickly to No. 3 on the Billboard jazz chart, and stayed
on the chart for sixty-two weeks. The freshness and the
15 excitement of her approach have led, inevitably, to her
being called the "new hope for jazz."
Spalding, born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, to a
single mother of African American, Asian, Native
American, and Hispanic heritage, belongs to a growing
20 movement of young musicians who have taken a less
traditional approach to the music. For years, young jazz
musicians adopted a near slavish devotion to sounding
like players from jazz's golden age (anywhere between
the nineteen-twenties and the arrival of the Beatles in
25 America, in 1964), rejecting the pop, rock, and fusion
experimentation that came in the nineteen-seventies
and eighties. The members of the Young Lions move-
ment, with Wynton Marsalis the most visible among
them, fetishized staunchly noncommercial "pure" jazz.
30 Attendance at jazz concerts bas been declining for
years; a hit jan album today might sell forty thousand
copies worldwide. Esperanza has so far sold more than
a hundred thousand. This is, in part, because Spalding
hews closer to dance rhythms than many of her contem-
35 poraries do. (Jazz has become increasingly compli-
cated, piling on odd meters and abstruse melodies.) It is
also because she sings; for audiences put off by the
cerebral rigors of instrumental improvisation, her pliant
also voice gives them something to hang on to. But her
40 original songs sacrifice none of the melodic sophistica-
tion and harmonic interest of jazz; and she is as techni-
cally adept, and as serious a student of the music's
history, as the most dutiful of the Young Lions.
Spalding is passionate about bringing fresh influ-
45 ences, voices. and idioms to the music. to prevent jazz
from becoming merely "a museum piece," as she put it.
In the course of a year, she plays a hundred and fifty
concert dates around the world. In 2009, she played at
the Nohel Peace Prize ceremony, in Oslo, Norway. The
50 schedule sharply limits the time she bas for writing new
material and practicing. She moved to Texas last fall in
part because it offers seclusion for working and writing.
In mid-January. Spalding spent a few days in a
state-of-the-art recording facility in New Jersey, over-
55 seeing the recording of the string arrangements for her
new album, Chamber Music Society. Present at the ses-
sions was Gil Goldstein, a jazz accordion player and
Grammy-winning arranger and producer. Hired as an
arranger for the project, Goldstein had tweaked
60 Spalding's string parts for the number "Apple Blos-
som." Although the two had worked smoothly through
most of the session, Spalding balked at the changes to
the song.
"Your string parts are too busy," Spalding told
65 him, as they sat on a sofa in the studio's control room.
"Busy?"Goldstein echoed, laughing. "No way!"
"It's so delicate--[ don't want it to get too'dense."
Spalding insisted on reverting to her earlier, sim-
pler arrangement. Goldstein assented, then went into
70 the soundproofed studio and began conducting the trio
of violin, cello, and viola. But Spalding was not hearing
what she wanted. She took the baton from Goldstein,
who surrendered it without complaint. (He later told me
that he likes it when a musician knows what he or she
75 wants, and that it makes for a better recording.) She put
on headphones and, following the sheet music spread
out in front of her on the conductor's podium, guided
the musicians through the session. At the one point,she
demanded a retake when she wanted the violinist to
80 play a certain note with an upward bow motion, rather
than a downstroke. Later, she asked the violinist to play
a series of notes by plucking the strings. She was unsat-
isfied with the sound.
"Maybe make that plucking more Jike bells-ting.
85 ting, ting,", she said.
The violinist mimicked the motion she had mimed
at the podium and brought out a bell-like sound.
"Yes!" Spalding said.