By Mike Dunham
Esperanza Spalding: The afro was missing when the jazz diva performed in Anchorage
Esperanza Spalding’s twin talents are that she can sing like Minnie Riperton while playing string bass like Charles Mingus on amphetamines. She had her whole body in constant motion during her concert in the Discovery Theatre on Friday night, knees and toes flexing to the beats, hips bumping the big fiddle, arms and elbows slashing out as if trying to reach other, invisible instruments, chest and head snapping, constantly accompanying her music with dancing.

The 23-year-old wunderkind, originally from Portland, Ore., kicked things off by telling the audience — in song — “First, a warning. If you’re expecting scat or classic jazz... well, that isn’t exactly what we do.”

Maybe not “exactly,” but close enough. It was an evening of serious jazz as hard and aggressively new wave as anything Anchorage has heard for a long while, with no concessions to pop or commercial tastes. In fact she lamented at one point that this kind of music amounts to less than one percent of all CD sales.

But jazz has rarely flourished in recorded form; like chamber music or Native American music, it most lives when live. Friday’s performance was a case in point. The energy that flashed between Spalding and her band (Otis Brown on drums; Leo Genovese playing keyboards; Ricardo Vogt on guitar) and from them to the audience would be impossible to capture on disc or video.

Switching between an electric stand-up bass and bass guitar, Spalding sang songs that tended to deal with white hot love that falls shy of perfect, but falls nonetheless: “She Got to You,” (“Though now you laugh/ And call me a fool/ I know you wanted me too/ Before she got to you); “I Know You Know,” (“Your heart’s/ A sleeping giant/ Worn out/ By someone/ You loved before me); “Precious,” (“All you got was me/ And that’s all that I can be/ I’m sorry if it let you down”).

In addition to her own songs, she did a few covers, including “Wild is the Wind,” made famous by Nina Simone, and, opening the second half Lionel Hampton’s “Midnight Sun” with the Johnny Mercer lyrics, which she performed as a solo, accompanying herself. She also dipped into Brazilian jazz, teasingly coaxing the audience into trying to follow her vocalizations.

But mostly it was unapologetic modern jazz, intensively rhythmic yet elusive with regard to meter, vocals from the gut, but without melodies that would stick. (The only tune I heard people humming afterward was her brief riff on “Let’s Fall in Love.”)

But the audience loved it. For more than two hours she had them hanging on every note, phrase after phrase, though much of what they were hearing would make Schoenberg sound like a child’s music box if you stopped to analyze it.

But no one did. The prodigy’s confident exuberance and contagious energy (slow moments were few and brief) made for high art that it was a pleasure to experience.

It was the first in a series of sold out shows at the Discovery Theatre. Tickets for the male choral group Cantus (Oct. 10) and guitar genius Leo Kottke (Oct. 11) are also gone.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.