Making a statement

Bassist Spalding adds lyrics to her many jazz talents

On her new CD, Esperanza Spalding shifts from wordless vocals to singing full-on lyrics, mostly of her own composition.

Jazz bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding is on the express track. At 23, she's not only a Berklee College of Music alumna, but already on the school's faculty, and she's gigging amid the jazz elite, from backing Joe Lovano or Pat Metheny to hitting the top festivals like Newport. Her new self-titled record marks another career jump, as she has left the European indie label of her 2006 disc, "Junjo," for Heads Up, with its well-regarded roster of established jazz, blues, and world artists. The new record came out this week, and Spalding plays a CD-release show at the Regattabar Thursday.

The eponymous title and glossy package with its abundant portraiture of Spalding with her acoustic bass and her distinctive Afro all signify that "Esperanza Spalding" is meant to be a statement release. It has that potential: As a bassist and bandleader, Spalding has a knack for pushing the instrument's range and cultivating its melodic possibilities, and her seemingly equal command of three jazz vernaculars - straight-ahead, Latin, and Brazilian - makes for a program that's diverse yet flows with ease and coherence.

But the big change here is the singing, specifically the shift from wordless vocals, a feature of Spalding's previous work, to full-on lyrics, mostly of her own composition and reprinted in the booklet. This makes "Esperanza Spalding" a much more accessible album, and in some ways more conventional. Inevitably, the singing creeps to the front of the music, and with it the lyrical content, which drifts toward themes of personal affirmation and hopefulness for social change that are pleasant enough but don't fully match the elegance of their delivery.

Perhaps that's why some of the most appealing passages here are the wordless ones, where you feel Spalding at her freeest, the syllables enriching and modifying the bass notes all at once, and pushing the band - notably pianist Leo Genovese and percussionist Jamey Haddad, with a few key guests such as saxophonist Donald Harrison or trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire - out into the open field.

The Latin fare, too, stands out, with Spalding not only at perfect ease in the musical sensibility, but also singing with great finesse in both Spanish and Portuguese. The record opens and closes on a Brazilian note, with a full-band treatment of "Ponta da Areia" at the front, and a beautifully intimate duo with flamenco guitarist Niño Josele on the Baden Powell classic "Samba en Preludio" to wrap things up.

In between, there's a version of "Body and Soul" that Spalding delivers in Spanish; it's the only straight-ahead standard on the disc, and a supple 5/4 rhythm and nervy delivery by the band give it plenty of propulsion to shake off the cobwebs.

So "Esperanza Spalding" is a statement after all: It positions its author in the legacy of great singer-instrumentalists from Nina Simone to Diana Krall, but with a polyglot dimension and a bassist's priority on rhythm and sympathetic group playing. There's a lot going on here, so much so that it leaves Spalding's next move refreshingly unpredictable.