'Who is Esperanza Spalding?’

Spalding is phenomenally talented – and a rarity in the male-dominated jazz world. Her calloused hands look hardly big enough to hold a double-bass, let alone play it as breathtakingly as she does.

At 20 she was hired to teach at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, just after graduating from there. In 2006 a tiny label released her debut album, 'Junjo’, an exhilarating hybrid of jazz and Latin rhythms.

And two years later a follow-up album, 'Esperanza’, came out and her fortunes took a sharp upward turn.

Between that and her most recent release, 'Chamber Music Society’, Spalding has been on stage with Prince, performed twice at the White House, played at the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, starred in a Banana Republic advertising campaign and appeared on various American talkshows.

Having seen her play in Central Park in 2009, where she opened for the soul singer Ledisi, I can confidently say she is something special.

The first thing one notices about Spalding (besides her oversized bass and her beauty) is her massive afro. 'All I can say is when I wash it and dry it and I let it do its thing, it just becomes an afro,’ she says.

'It’s become my look, I guess. It’s a mix of all of my ancestors.’

Her ancestors must have been a globe-trotting bunch – she is of African-American, Welsh, Asian, Native American and Spanish descent. She speaks (and often sings in) Portuguese and Spanish, as well as English.

Spalding was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1984, and she and her elder brother were raised by their mother in a neighbourhood where crack addicts wandered the streets and gunshots sounded outside the window.

She won’t talk about her father, but does say that the family took to sleeping on the floor after a neighbour’s child was killed by a stray bullet that came flying through a window.

Yet, Spalding has said, 'you can grow up with literally nothing and you don’t suffer if you know you’re loved and valued’.

Music became her sanctuary and she’d spend hours lost in the rhythms booming from the radio. 'I was exposed to many kinds of music including rock and disco, classical and folk, Midtown and Miles Davis, Sly Stone and David Bowie,’ she says.

Her mother enrolled her in a community music programme, where she learned violin and piano and wrote her first songs. Twenty years later she laughs at her own precociousness.

'My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven,’ she says. 'I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I’d change little things in the music and write different lyrics.

'Basically, I was plagiarising the songs and pretending they were mine. When Mum came home from work I’d make her sing my songs with me.’

Spalding walks across the hotel suite – she’s wearing brown cowboy boots and grey trousers from a vintage shop – and pours herself a cup of coffee.

She is charming company, undeniably serious but quick-witted and playful, too. 'I have to do music,’ she says, stirring in some milk and honey. 'It’s not just about the performance or being in the studio, it’s every single part of it.’

When Spalding was 11 her mother took the drastic step of removing her daughter from the local school.

The atmosphere was so destructive and the teaching so poor, she says, that her mother believed she would fare better educating her herself.

'That was a trip,’ says Spalding. 'I don’t think I would’ve done as well in middle school or high school.’ Not that life at home was plain sailing. 'I put my mother through a lot when I was a teenager. I used to lie a lot. Now we talk all the time. She is 63 years old and a beautiful person.’

Spalding played in several jazz and pop groups as a teenager and at 14 won a scholarship to the exclusive private arts high school Northwest Academy.

It was there that she chanced upon an upright double-bass abandoned in the corner of a classroom one afternoon.

By now she played several instruments – guitar, oboe and clarinet, as well as piano and violin – but, seeing Spalding’s instant rapport with the cheap plywood double-bass, her teacher Brian Ross encouraged her to focus on that one instrument.

Three years later she won another scholarship, to Berklee, whose alumni include John Mayer, Diana Krall and Quincy Jones. One of Esperanza Spalding’s biggest supporters over the past few years has been President Obama. 'I wouldn’t be so bold to say that we are friends or even acquaintances, but someone in his administration took a liking to my music. It’s such an honour to contribute and to represent jazz in the international arena.’

Prince, whom she first met in 2006, has also become one of Spalding’s mentors. 'I sent him a package of all of the music I had at that point,’ she explains.

'I sent him demos and ideas for songs and a few months later I got a call from his people asking if I’d like to fly to Las Vegas to play with him at one of his after-shows.’ (For decades Prince has performed 'after-show’ gigs in a separate venue a few hours after the main concert.)

'Of course, I said yes.’ After that Prince invited her to various cities to jam with him. 'Musically there was chemistry, but we also started having shockingly deep conversations right from the beginning.

'We’re interested in the connections between the subjects that humans tend to think most about: religion, science, spirituality, history and politics. Immediately we hit it off talking about these different things.

'You know,’ she goes on, 'whenever I’m hanging out with him I always feel so frumpy. He really knows how to dress in a beautiful, creative way. It’s artistic; he has such an incredible eye for style.’

Spalding is no stranger to flamboyant dressing herself. 'My personal style really depends what the context is,’ she says. 'On nights that I’m feeling a need to stretch personally and artistically, I tend to put together outfits that are very quirky, mismatched and over-the-top eclectic.’

Outfits like the blue velvet fairy dress she wore during a Prince tribute televised last year, perhaps? 'Yes,’ she agrees. 'I feel like if you saw somebody walk to the bandstand like that, you’re ready to receive something quirky.’

Her own music, she says, is currently 'quieter and more intimate, so I wear something very reserved, sort of this librarian, intellectual look, because I want them to know’ – she breaks into a stage whisper – 'this is something serious!

'People see me come out and the first thing I do is take my coat off and you see a black and white, formal, reserved-looking outfit. And it’s silent as I go to the bass. I’m always thinking about the symbolism of my outfit.’

Spalding’s three albums are a head-spinningly inventive blend of Latin rhythms, funk, bossa nova, soul and orchestral strings.

'Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all,’ she says. 'That’s the kind of fusion I want to capture in my music.’

Her biggest single so far is the haunting Winter Sun from 'Chamber Music Society’. 'I wrote the music to it just sitting in the house in New Jersey where I was staying in the winter.

'I titled the song before there were any lyrics, which is often what happens. It was just a feeling of delight in the winter – the sun on a clear day, the way it lights up the coldness. T

'hen I was on tour – I was in a hotel room – and woke up at one in the morning with the lyrics in my head.’

Spalding is currently working on her next album, 'Radio Music Society’. Radio Music and Chamber Music were conceived as a two-part project – where Chamber Music was rooted in classical jazz, Radio Music is, Spalding says, 'a paean to Top 40 radio.

'I plan on making that a pretty funky album. Drawing more from R&B, popular music and hip-hop. I’ve been in the studio working with Q-Tip [the front man of the American band A Tribe Called Quest].’

Spalding was still a little girl when Tribe were in their prime, releasing genre-bending rap albums such as 'The Low End Theory’ (1991) and 'Midnight Marauders’ (1993).

'My brother is seven years older than me, so whenever he moved on musically he gave me his old CDs,’ she recalls. She didn’t initially take to the music, but 'as I got older I rediscovered Tribe’s material and their combination of melody and harmonic content appealed to me more’.

'We hit it off immediately,’ Q-Tip says of her. 'Originally I had contacted her for my next project and she wound up recruiting me for hers. Our taste just allied.

'Esperanza is edgy and expressive and that all comes through in the songs we’ve been working on. Though we come from different worlds, Esperanza and I are musical and artistic comrades.’

Spalding is also something of a film buff and for this next record she plans to 'have impressionistic short films made for each song’. There isn’t a director yet, but she’ll write the scripts herself.

Spalding sees film as another way of communicating emotion. She mentions Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

'That film is so powerful,’ she says. 'I felt really depressed and strange after seeing it; I couldn’t believe the emotional control the director had over me.’

When not touring (Spalding plays about 150 shows worldwide every year) or in the studio recording, she lives between Greenwich Village in New York and Austin, Texas, where she rents a large, one-bedroom apartment from her friend the singer Lian Amber.

Austin is where she goes when she needs to work on new material. There is no time at the moment, she tells me, to think about a relationship.

Outside the hotel window pigeons fly past and daylight turns to dusk. Spalding’s Grammy win is still in the future.

She doesn’t yet know that she will step up to the podium, shell-shocked, in a daring green Selma Karaca dress and humbly accept her award with the words, 'Thank you for even nominating me’.

She does not know it yet, but her world will change. Soon everybody will know who Esperanza Spalding is.