April 3 will see the launch of the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, a curated web portal for new musical work by bassist, vocalist, and composer Esperanza Spalding. The first activity on the site will be the premiere of Triangle, a three-part suite that Spalding created in collaboration with singer, rapper, and multi-instrumentalist Phoelix, featuring Wayne Shorter on saxophone and produced by Raphael Saadiq.
Triangle is a unique conception, with each of its three tracks designed to be consumed in a specific way and for a specific emotional benefit. Spalding created the music with feedback from experts in the fields of music therapy and neuroscience in hopes that it would help relieve the psychic burden that the past year’s COVID-19 lockdowns have created in listeners.
However, the Songwrights Apothecary Lab is meant to be a far larger project for Spalding. Under its aegis, she intends to continue creating music in collaboration with experts and fellow musicians—a new experiment in spiritual healing.
The Songwrights Apothecary Lab goes live at midnight, Pacific Daylight Time (3 a.m. EDT).
Another one of Spalding’s recent projects—Iphigenia, an opera co-composed with Shorter and inspired by the final play of Euripides—is nearing its final stage: production. To make that a reality, as recently reported by WBGO, Spalding has created both a production company and an Indiegogo campaign to fund it. The campaign, which aims to raise $75,000, has of this writing collected a little over a third of that total; it’s currently set to close on April 30.
