Esperanza Spalding was born in 1984. She is a critically acclaimed jazz musician and songwriter. Her talent as a bass player and vocalist is very impressive as seen in her cover of Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed" at the White House in 2009.

She is known for her work in the field of jazz fusion. This is a genre that began to forge the traditions of jazz music - that relied heavily on improvisation - with rock and pop.

The song "Precious" is a good example, which contains features of jazz and pop music.

In terms of pop music:

• There is a verse-chorus structure (verse 1 from 0'30, chorus from 0'52 and a bridge at 3'38).

• There are catchy parallel vocal harmonies used in the introduction and a distinctive chorus vocal melody.

In terms of jazz music:

• She uses the double bass rather than the bass guitar to provide a tone quality reminiscent of the jazz tradition.

• Improvised melodies in the accompaniment play fills and there is an improvised solo for the electric piano at 2'45.

• Extended chords are used which are more complex than regular major and minor triads.

Esperanza Spalding is still active as a musician. Her latest album, "12 Little Spells" was released in 2019 and portrays different parts of the human body in a unique and introspective way. The song "Lest We Forget" is about blood. In it, she fuses her song writing style with electronic approaches including the use of synths and a drum machine. The song opens with a melismatic vocal melody which unravels in a very mesmerising way, representing the constancy of our bloodstream in sustaining human life.

Here are a couple of other examples of jazz fusion:

• Rockit by Herbie Hancock was released in 1983. Herbie is a jazz pianist who wanted to fuse his musical style with something different and so he ventured into the field of hip-hop. From the beginning of the song turntable scratching can be heard alongside the use of loops and punchy drum machines. His synth melody comes in at 0'28 using a traditional blues scale.

• Joni Mitchell was a prolific musical artist who began her career in the 1960s as a folk singer. Like Herbie, she ventured into different musical styles (Herbie and Joni did actually cross paths themselves!). This song came from her 1975 album and this live recording features bassist Jaco Pastorius and guitarist Pat Meheny, both of whom are significant jazz musicians. Meheny can be heard improvising in his recognisable style and Pastorius' bass part is similarly improvised, including buoyant fills.

• Snarky Puppy is an instrumental group that began making music in 2004. They are known for recording all of their albums live, often with a studio audience listening on headphones. "Lingus" is an example of one of these performances. They often use a combination of rock-inspired grooves, guitar riffs and synths alongside jazz-inspired brass lines and improvisation.

The set work, "Samba Em Preludio" is in a bossa nova style. This is a style which is a fusion of American jazz and Brazilian samba. It traditionally uses a jazz structure and format accompanied by a steady latin rhythm to provide a relaxing mood. There are two separate pages dedicated to these styles of music above.

The first example of a bossa nova is a famous track called "Desafinado" by Stan Getz (composed by Jobim), released in 1962 soon after the genre's emergence. Notice that the quavers are straight whereas in jazz they are usually swung. The acoustic guitar plays a typically syncopated accompaniment which characterises the gentle and lilting bossa groove (notated below) whilst the chords use elaborate jazz extensions and alterations. Getz plays an improvised saxophone solo at 1'52 following the traditional jazz structure.

The second example is very recent. Jacob Collier is a prodigy pianist who has nearly completed a four volume album called "Djesse". This song, "Lua" is from the second volume and was composed and recorded with Portuguese multi-instrumentalist, MARO. She is seen performing on vocals with a nylon-string guitar while Jacob also sings and plays piano. The bossa nova comes in at 2'24 after an elaborate string introduction. Its tempo is very slow and this helps to make the song particularly delicate and intimate. Again, a similarly syncopated guitar/piano rhythm is used to comp, characterising the song as a bossa nova (notated below). At 5'38 Jacob takes an improvised piano solo, much of which is in octaves and accompanied by pizzicato strings.

The song "Samba Em Preludio" was composed by Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes in 1962. It is a love song but the mood of the song is very melancholic. It is worth listening to this original version to appreciate the bossa nova style. Spalding's interpretation doesn't differ much from it; key differences include the fact that her version doesn't include drums and is a vocal solo rather than a duet. The verse from 2'07 in the original song includes a section where the texture polyphonically layers up the two singers, juxtaposing the two melodies of the song.

Spalding's version was the last track of her 2008 album, "Esperanza".

The lyrics of the song and a translation can be viewed at the bottom of the page.

II-V-I cadence, acciaccatura, accidentals, acoustic bass guitar, acoustic (nylon-stringed) guitar, altered chord, [having a sense of] anticipation, arpeggio, ascending, bossa nova, cadenza, chromatic, comping, cross rhythm, descending, diminished 7th, disjunct, dotted note, double stop, extended chords, fermata, flamenco, free tempo, harmonic rhythm, homophonic, improvised, jazz, melody and accompaniment, monophonic, mordent, perfect cadence, picked, plucked, polyphonic, pull-off, quintuplet, samba, scalic, sequence, slash chord, slide, solo, stepwise, strumming, syllabic, syncopation, tag, tessitura, tremolo, triadic, trill, triplet, tritone, turnaround, verse, voicing.

Active, autonomous, buoyant, catchy, clashing, cohesive, colouristic, complex, constant, contrasting, conversational, dark, decisive, decorative, definite, [having a sense of] depth, delicate, despairing, discordant, dissonant, distinctive, [having a sense of] drive, easy, emotive, energetic, energising, ethereal, exciting, expressive, final, free, gentle, ghostly, [having a sense of] heartache, idiomatic, independent, interesting, intimate, intricate, jarring, lilting, [having a sense of] longing, lively, melancholic, mellow, moderate, [having a sense of] momentum, nostalgic, novel, plaintive, playful, pleasing, relaxed, rhythmic, secure, smooth, soft, sorrowful, stylistic, unpredictable, varied, vibrant, virtuosic, warm.