2010 · Chamber Music Society
The 2011 Grammy for Best New Artist was the first time a jazz musician had won the category. Esperanza Spalding
Library — Double Bass
Esperanza Spalding
5 albums as leader and 6 as sideman (2008–2024), each listed chronologically.
As Leader · 5
As Sideman · 6
Notes on these albums · 6
2016 · Emily's D+Evolution
Best New Artist is a pop category, and it usually goes to whoever stands at the front and sings. In 2011 it went to Esperanza Spalding, an upright bassist who sings while she plays, on the strength of Chamber Music Society (2010) — a record built around a string trio. She was the first jazz musician to win it.
2012 · Radio Music Society
The credits on Afro-Desia (1975) put Joe Lovano in an organist's band, seven years before Psalm (1982) set him alongside the drummer's group he would be identified with. Looking backwards from the later reputation, that route in is easy to miss.
2017 · Exposure
Chris Dave, the drummer on Robert Glasper's genre-bending Black Radio (2012), also plays on 21 (2011), one of the best-selling pop albums of the 2010s — the same hands linking a neo-soul jazz session to a stadium-scale pop blockbuster.
Robert Glasper2008 · Karibu
Lionel Loueke, a guitarist from Benin who was still relatively unknown, played on Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters (2007). The album won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2008, a rare triumph for a jazz record over mainstream pop and rock competition.
Lionel Loueke2011 · Bitches
Elvin Jones' 1992 album Youngblood was stocked almost entirely with then-unknown young players. One of them, 19-year-old trumpeter Nicholas Payton, would go on to lead his own Gumbo Nouveau and become one of the defining voices of New Orleans jazz — the veteran drummer's record turned out to be the start of someone else's career, not a victory lap.
Nicholas Payton