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Esperanza Spalding - Emily’s D + Evolution (2016) Deluxe Edition

Posted By: Designol

Date: 2 Oct 2023 19:45:38

Deluxe edition includes two bonus tracks. 2016 album from the acclaimed jazz artist. Esperanza Spalding presents Emily's D+Evolution, a rekindling of her childhood interest in theater, poetry and movement, which delves into a broader concept of performance. Taking a new approach to her on-stage persona, the remarkable Spalding taps into new creative energy, delivering musical vignettes inspired during a "sleepless night of full moon inspiration." As she puts it, "Emily is my middle name, and I'm using this fresh persona as my inner navigator. This project is about going back and reclaiming un-cultivated curiosity, and using it as a compass to move forward and expand. My hope for this group is to create a world around each song, there are a lot of juicy themes and stories in the music. We will be staging the songs as much as we play them, using characters, video, and the movement of our bodies".

On previous albums, Grammy-winning bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding dived into jazz standards, Brazilian rhythms, and sophisticated, harmonically nuanced R&B. But with her 2016 album, Emily's D+Evolution, she takes an entirely different approach. A concept album revolving around a central character named Emily (Spalding's middle name), Emily's D+Evolution is not a jazz album – though jazz does inform much of the music here. Instead, Spalding – who also co-produced the album alongside legendary producer Tony Visconti (David Bowie) – builds the release largely around angular, electric guitar-rich prog rock, kinetic, rhythmically rich jazz fusion, and lyrically poetic pop. Of course, Spalding's version of pop is never predictable, always harmonically inventive, and frequently imbued with as many improvisational moments as possible within the boundaries of a given song. But relative to her previous releases, this is still a significant shift. Helping to bring Emily's D+Evolution to life is a band Spalding put together specifically for this project, including guitarist Matthew Stevens, drummer Karriem Riggins, keyboardist Corey King, and others. Conceptually, the character of Emily represents Spalding as a young girl, and works as a conduit through which she explores and unpacks complex ideas about life, love, sex, race, education, and the creative process. While it would be reductive to call Emily's D+Evolution a retro album, Spalding's harmonic and melodic content and production aesthetics definitely have a '70s quality. Cuts like "Earth to Heaven" and "Noble Nobles" bring to mind the forward-thinking sound of singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell's work with jazz artists like Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius, whose liquid bass style is an obvious antecedent to Spalding's approach here. While Spalding never sounds anything less than original on the album, part of the beauty here is in recognizing her inspirations and reveling in how she has made them her own. "Elevate or Operate" sounds like a serpentine Steely Dan melody, sung with Valkyrian agility over a strident, Dr. Dre-friendly militaristic beat. Similarly, "One" brings to mind Mitchell's soaring vocal style, set against a Greek chorus of harmonized backing vocals and accented by Stevens' cascading guitar lines, like something John McLaughlin would do with Mahavishnu Orchestra. Elsewhere, tracks like "Good Lava" and "Funk the Fear" reveal Spalding's swaggering, inner rock goddess and sound like a fantasy collaboration between Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix. While Spalding has long been a virtuoso bassist and commanding, lithe vocalist, she's developed into a gifted songwriter with a poet's sense for imagistic, emotionally resonant lyrics. It's a formidable combination best represented here by the epic "Ebony and Ivy." Bookended with a machine-gun-fire spoken word poem, the song allows Spalding as Emily to explore a mythic childhood netherworld in which she ambitiously juxtaposes the joys of learning from the natural world and the desire for a formal education against historical notions of how science was, ironically, used to justify slavery. She sings, "It's been hard to grow outside/Growin' good and act happy/And pretend that the ivy vines/Didn't weigh our branches down."

Review by Matt Collar, Allmusic.com

Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding has moved effortlessly between genres whether performing with saxophone great Wayne Shorter or releasing projects which have incorporated explorations in chamber and pop music. She's impressed fans with her beautiful vocals and expressive instrumental skills even though questions remain about her musical identity. Is she jazz, pop, or a fringe artist who won't be locked into any genre?

The answer to that question has no bearing on Spalding's talent and creativity which continues to blossom in Emily's D+Evolution, a project based on a song cycle and theatrical production prepared for live performance. It unveils yet another layer into her—outlandish modern art-pop swirled with funk, poetry, and some Jimi Hendrix psychedelia thrown in for good measure.

Centered on an alter ego which happens to be Spalding's middle name, Emily has come out to perform in a music playground that might be described as a 21rst century Alice and Wonderland complete with adventures. This time around the music is abstract and edgy as Emily is introduced in the sexy rocking tune "Good Lava" as Spalding sings the verses "See this pretty girl?; Watch this pretty girl flow." And flow she does in challenging and thought-provoking themes where topics reflecting on the true meaning of love ("Unconditional Love"), misconceptions of good and evil ("Judas"), physical attraction ("Rest In Pleasure") and a desire to get off of life's elevator in "Elevate or Operate."

Tunes like "Ebony and Ivy" are provocative with its rapid succession of spoken words (ochre, ivy, brick, and leather bound books built up by heavy lock crooks with unburdened minds of bastardized Darwinian logic) wrapped around a hip rhythmic tempo. The music is extremely tight; a trio setting augmented by background vocalists where everyone works as one unit. There are no lengthy jazz-like solos as the thrust lies in the whole production of Spading's inner workings of song forms with intricate vocals arrangements. Live sessions of the recording have included theatrical interpretations of the tunes and hand puppets. That's right, hand puppets.

As if to ignore detractors, the piece "Funk the Fear" delivers a defiant message with groovy interaction between Spalding on fretless bass and Matt Stevens's crunchy lead guitar and the lyric's repeating verses "Funk the Fear; Live Your Life; Cause in an instant it could be gone." It is most definitely the way Spalding delivers this unique recording.

Review by Mark F. Turner, All About Jazz

Esperanza Spalding at Allmusic
Esperanza Spalding at Wiki

Tracklist:

01. Good Lava (3:38)
02. Unconditional Love (3:46)
03. Judas (4:11)
04. Earth to Heaven (3:52)
05. One (3:15)
06. Rest in Pleasure (4:59)
07. Ebony and Ivy (4:23)
08. Noble Nobles (3:34)
09. Farewell Dolly (2:08)
10. Elevate or Operate (4:04)
11. Funk the Fear (5:07)
12. I Want It Now (2:53)

Bonus tracks:
13. Change Us (3:57)
14. Unconditional Love (Alternate Version) (9:40)

EAC log

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 3 from 29. August 2011

EAC extraction logfile from 3. March 2016, 13:05

Esperanza Spalding / Emily’s D + Evolution

Used drive : hp DVD-RAM GHB0N Adapter: 0 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Gap handling : Appended to previous track

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -8 -V -T "ARTIST=%artist%" -T "TITLE=%title%" -T "ALBUM=%albumtitle%" -T "DATE=%year%" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%tracknr%" -T "TOTALTRACKS=%numtracks%" -T "GENRE=%genre%" -T "ALBUM ARTIST=%albumartist%" -T "ALBUMARTIST=%albumartist%" -T "COMMENT=EAC V1.0 beta 3, Secure Mode, Test & Copy, AccurateRip, FLAC -8" %source%

TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
1 | 0:00.00 | 3:38.08 | 0 | 16357
2 | 3:38.08 | 3:46.33 | 16358 | 33340
3 | 7:24.41 | 4:10.49 | 33341 | 52139
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11 | 37:49.51 | 5:07.07 | 170226 | 193257
12 | 42:56.58 | 2:53.06 | 193258 | 206238
13 | 45:49.64 | 3:57.30 | 206239 | 224043
14 | 49:47.19 | 9:39.44 | 224044 | 267512

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Track 8

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Track 9

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Track 13

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Track 14

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None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database

No errors occurred

End of status report

==== Log checksum 708B85C73E7999D863C884210C55E5A4B2580DFAEC578970C3B27B3943612EB3 ====

DR log

foobar2000 1.2 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2016-12-03 21:07:10

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Analyzed: Esperanza Spalding / Emily’s D + Evolution
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

DR Peak RMS Duration Track
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DR7 -0.02 dB -8.48 dB 3:38 01-Good Lava
DR6 0.00 dB -7.44 dB 3:46 02-Unconditional Love
DR7 0.00 dB -8.72 dB 4:11 03-Judas
DR7 0.00 dB -8.87 dB 3:52 04-Earth to Heaven
DR7 0.00 dB -9.46 dB 3:15 05-One
DR6 -0.11 dB -9.48 dB 4:59 06-Rest in Pleasure
DR7 0.00 dB -9.97 dB 4:23 07-Ebony and Ivy
DR8 0.00 dB -9.46 dB 3:34 08-Noble Nobles
DR9 -0.26 dB -12.47 dB 2:08 09-Farewell Dolly
DR8 0.00 dB -9.87 dB 4:04 10-Elevate or Operate
DR8 -0.09 dB -10.33 dB 5:07 11-Funk the Fear
DR8 -0.28 dB -10.70 dB 2:53 12-I Want It Now
DR7 0.00 dB -9.97 dB 3:57 13-Change Us
DR9 -0.05 dB -12.36 dB 9:40 14-Unconditional Love (Alternate Version)
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Number of tracks: 14
Official DR value: DR7

Samplerate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 891 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================================================

All thanks to original releaser - tdelyon

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