ESPERANZA IN THE WINGS

By Michaela Bancud

The Portland Tribune, Dec 14, 2001, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Most nights of the week, Esperanza Spalding is playing music at clubs and restaurants.

But until she’s onstage, the 17-year-old Spalding keeps to the shadows: Once club owners find out how old she is, they often ask her to wait outside. Other times, she sits alone at tables marked “Minors Only.”

Spalding plays the 5/6 upright bass, which is smaller than the typical upright but still bigger than she. It shadows her everywhere; she lugs it around town on her back and straps it into the passenger seat of her car.

Friends, teachers and mentors expect big things of Spalding, who went to King Elementary School in Northeast Portland and then to the Northwest Academy, a private high school downtown. She left the academy after two years, earned her GED and headed to Portland State University for music lessons.

She thinks it was the smartest choice she’s ever made.

“It’s probably the best high school around, but it wasn’t working for me,” Spalding says.

Dishing out advice to other young musicians, she doesn’t mince words: “Anyone who is serious about anything should get out of high school Ñ even if you want to grow grass for a living.”

Juggling work, rehearsals, lessons and applications to music schools, at the moment Spalding takes classical lessons from Kenneth Baldwin, assistant principal bass with the Oregon Symphony, and jazz lessons from Andre St. James, a bassist in the Mel Brown Quintet.

A week ago, Spalding’s plan was to go to New York to visit The Juilliard School. That plan went bust. In the meantime, she’s been accepted at the Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship.

She performs in four bands. She plays bass and sings vocals in Noise for Pretend, an indie sophisto-pop band that includes Ben Workman on guitar and Christian Cochran on drums.

Noise for Pretend records on a local label, Hush Records, and recently released a CD with Chad Crouch’s Blanket Music. Spalding’s voice is light and airy, like a young Astrid Gilberto. On

“Mamagranite,” she sings in a mellow, low register.

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