Reviewed onSaturday June 4 (photo by Ashley Mar)
It was obvious Esperanza Spalding’s huge dress was going to do something. It was so big and so square and so clearly not just a dress. Perhaps it hid dancers, or pyrotechnic equipment. Hell, you could get a whole piano under there.
After struggling round the stage with it for the opening song – a sensuous, jazzy blues number – Spalding turned her back to the audience and plonked it down. She then hoisted up the back, pitching it into a white ruffled pyramid. After a few moments, she then emerged from a split at the base, dressed in bright white and wearing a homemade gold crown.
It was a rather pained visual metaphor to show that Spalding has been reborn. No longer the jazz singer you’ve seen serenade the Obamas at the White House, she’s now Emily, the central character of her new concept album, Emily’s D+Evolution.
Quite what the concept is wasn’t too clear. It must mean something, because ‘meaning’ was laboured over throughout the show. It was less a gig than a musical – there was some kind of narrative and band members played their parts.
Her three backing vocalists took the lead roles. Stood in front of a bookshelf, they had choreographed moves, at one point coming to centre stage only to fall down dramatically as if playing dead. In another scene, a stepladder was brought out – Spalding took a step up, got down again and it was taken away.
The books on that shelf had a purpose. During one song they were piled up in Spalding’s arms and she pretended to read lines from them. Kind of like a library-based revision montage.
It all came across like it was dashed together by year 12 drama students desperately trying to be profound. Were we watching a band or a show? What was an act and what was not?
The amateur dramatics might not have been great, but the gig needed it. Fusion jazz, especially when mixed with prog rock, is not the most accessible kind of music. There were extended avant-garde instrumental wig-outs, there were precisely syncopated five-syllable-a-second a capellas. But it’s the kind of music only the brain can appreciate. It’s too cerebral to grab the guts.
Pretentious and pointless, that dress stunt would have been more fitting if Spalding had instead crawled up the hole in the rear of her gown.
