Esperanza means hope, in Spanish. One year ago today, we posted Esperanza Spalding’s enrapturing performance of “Tell Him” at the 2009 White House poetry jam, and today we bring her back to the front page, to honor her for winning “best new artist” at the Grammys. But with all that’s taking place in the world, why write about Esperanza Spalding? Because her win is a sign there is hope we can be more thoughtful about how we make music and why.

One after another commercial vehicle have come on the scene in recent years, professing to study the nation’s talent and giving us all a great show in the process, but more than anything, giving record companies a way to evaluate “where the market is going” and have some chance at backing a sure thing. Extremely talented artists have emerged that brilliantly navigate the waters of stardom and ride the waves of their popularity to ever more… popularity.

It’s both a sign of how shallow some aspects of our popular culture are that Twitter has been ablaze with jokes, insults, surprise and dismay, about someone who was “unknown” winning Best New Artist. The award is not Most Famous Pop-star, but BEST NEW ARTIST. Esperanza Spalding is one of the most promising young innovators in music today, and a real creative artist. This is why it’s worth taking note that the music industry is taking note.

Lady Gaga is an astonishing talent. She can do classical piano, soul, dance music, and somehow always have the right energy and a depth of personal feeling for the music she plays. And she’s very good with the fame game, too. But Esperanza Spalding is not as unknown as people pretend; she played at the White House in 2009 and at the Nobel Prize ceremony as well, along with stars like Wyclef Jean, and is widely respected among people who know soulful jazzy music, both for her raw ability and for her unique style.

She was invited to teach at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music —where she had studied— at the early age of 20. According to a lengthy and impressive New Yorker profile from last year, “By fifteen, she was the concertmaster of the Chamber Music Society of Oregon.” Now, she’s the first jazz musician ever to win the Grammy for Best New Artist.

We need more of this in today’s rapid-fire innuendo-laden society: a reminder of the human scale. Not everything can be fireworks and mirror balls; sometimes it’s important to just honor the music, and it might be, at certain special times, that the best artist isn’t someone aiming to sell out magazines and stadium concerts, but someone who loves making the music people can feel and staying close to where and how it is made.

We should try to think a little more generously about the creative arts. For every Rihanna or Eminem, there are tens of thousands of artists who never earn enough to make a living doing what they love. Esperanza Spalding’s sudden collision with fame illustrates the problem: when someone of such immense talent is seen as a shocking outsider winning something that’s meant for someone already famous —which by definition it’s not— we get a glimpse of how our listening choices are often made for us, and even people of great ability can linger long on the margins without ever being recognized for their accomplishments.

Not every great actor has won an Oscar. In fact, most of them have not. In fact, statistically, it’s probable most have never even been heard of by most filmgoers. Most talented writers have never been on the New York Times bestseller list; in fact, many would argue the two seem at times mutually exclusive, and there is an unfortunate kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in having once been listed. The next time around, the books sell, whether they’re worthy or not.

We often complain that what bothers us about “the world” is government or “big business” or an old boys network that excludes newcomers and innovators, but sometimes, it’s our very own tendency to just reach for the closest thing on the shelf and ignore the quiet genius of people no one else has told us exist. A little curiosity, a little passion, and Esperanza Spalding would not have seemed to shocking a choice.

Let’s hope people will give her a real listen, for their own personal enrichment and enjoyment, before signing away their right to decide whether what pleases their ears has to be already known, top of the charts, or sanctioned by some official pop-music protocol watchdog.

Esperanza Spalding, a rising star in the jazz world, and an increasingly recognizable face at high-profile cultural gatherings, performs “Tell Him” at last year’s White House Poetry Jam, in this video. The song is a moody, jazzy blend of love and meditation, an apt message for a weekend on which we celebrate both the virtues of love and affection and the political achievements and moral compass of past presidents.

Michael Jackson was ‘the king of pop’, an informal title he acquired through the relentless echo chamber of American celebrity. He won this title by topping the charts from a young age, by having the “it” quality, by innovative body motions that changed dance, like the “moonwalk”, by way of record music sales, by way of conquering the video medium, by staging a massive global drive to fund food aid to Africa, by being odd enough to garner endless headlines, or because none of us really understand what it takes to rise to the top of the popular culture that elevated him and defamed him, or what it’s like to be there. So he was “king”, the way any royalty lives a life incomprehensible —for its opulence, its complications, its stresses— to the rest of society.

People close to Jackson have said over the past 24 hours that he lived an amount of stress impossible for any human heart to endure — an indirect or not so indirect suggestion that his heart just “gave out” from a life too intense and too big for the light-framed soft-spirited pop idol to withstand. It is said he weighed as little as 100 lbs. in recent months, that he was receiving regular treatments for an unconfirmed illness, that he had suffered from heart problems, that he was engaged in intensive weight training to prepare for his revival concert tour, that he needed medication to maintain the energy necessary to do all of this, and maybe he overdosed or mixed meds in inadvisable ways.

We don’t know. But the speculation that he had perhaps gotten too close to or even abused children that stayed at his Neverland Ranch continues. There have been passionate and angry outbursts from people convinced that he somehow maneuvered or bought his way out of conviction on those charges. There have been outpourings of affection from long-time friends and acquaintances who say he never could have done any such thing and who cite his acquittal as proof he was innocent. He is at once a universal symbol of pop culture, its excesses and its rewards, its infamy and its contribution to culture generally, and a scapegoat on whom people from across society place their worst feelings, without actually having met him or having knowledge of his mysterious personal life.

The pop-culture epic that is the story of Michael Jackson is riveting in part because of the extreme air of mystery that surrounds him. For some, it is the mystery of his unique abilities and apparently natural charisma and talent. For others, it is the mystery of his intense shyness, his reclusive ways, his periodic obsessions (like the hyperbaric chamber or the veiling of his children, whom he wanted to protect from the trials of celebrity). And for others, it is the mystery of what could possess a grown man to continue to interact with children after all the ugly allegations and the suspicion and infamy that came with past interactions.

There is also, of course, the mystery of whether what is imagined about him is true at all. Did he do it? Did he suffer from deprivation of childhood? Was he violently beaten or abused as a child? Was there a trauma we don’t know about that forced him into seclusion? How did he so persistently maintain a life both isolated and in the spotlight, for decades? Why did he? Was his skin losing pigmentation and for that reason, did he bleach his skin in an effort to maintain a uniform complexion? Or was he “trying to be white”? We don’t know.

He was a child star, a talent, an innovator, a charitable man, a man of conscience, a mystery, possibly a criminal, though we don’t have proof, a stunning success and a startling failure. His biography runs the gamut of ordinary people’s dreams and nightmares, and in that way, somehow, he became like part of an extended family of emotional symbols that pop culture has become for the general public.

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say, as someone did yesterday, that his was a “once in history” talent, or that his loss is another in a long string of national traumas that will mark us all, as suggested by Larry King. But somehow, there was popular energy concentrated in the person of Michael Jackson, in his story and the life he lived, some of which he chose and some of which pursued him to his endless chagrin.

His passing has suddenly opened up a window into our collective awareness: we focused on him, discussed his personal attitudes and relationships, made guesses and judged him, freely and at will. Does that say something about us? About the kind of culture we have made and are making every day? Does it serve as a caution to us all to rethink what elements of our society we elevate or tear down, or the grounds on which we base our choices in that regard? It might.

Anything beyond that, if we are honest, is speculation. The last two days have seen journalists quipping about the pop icon like teenagers trying to get a grip on something beyond their capacity to imagine, and serious reporters bending over backwards rhetorically to blend the narrative of his status as a much beloved figure with the sad story of a man who may have engaged in morally unjustifiable abuses. Michael Jackson splits our language as he split our public consciousness, not because he is a good or a bad man nor because his fame was warranted or unwarranted, but because as a society we put so much of our energy into his story for so long.

This Playing for Change song brings together musicians who played together on “Stand by Me”, and for the first time, shows all the musicians playing together in the same place. The piece is a live recording of Grandpa Elliot and Clarence Bekker, singing with this band from around the world, in New Orleans. An audience of thousands was able to witness this inspired performance.

The Playing for Change team has traveled the world to bring musicians and artists together to craft “songs around the world” that show a common emotional and aspirational fabric of humanity. They write of this particular piece:

As we made our way around the world we encountered love, hate, rich and poor, black and white, and many different religious groups and ideologies. It became very clear that as a human race we need to transcend from the darkness to the light and music is our weapon of the future. This song around the world features musicians who have seen and overcome conflict and hatred with love and perseverance.

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Conflict is far more complex than the rash dualism that it breeds: often the entrenched bias and hatred that emerged from or during conflict was unthinkable to many before the outbreak of hostilities or the imposition of a one-sided or otherwise brutal regime. Getting beyond conflict requires getting beyond the logic of conflict, remembering the common humanity that makes it possible to do so.

This “song around the world” recording of Bob Marley’s “One Love” is an expression of the Playing for Change team’s approach to using the creative process to reach the point where the message of human creativity and expression illuminates a basic common humanity. It is, like any effective rendition of the song, a hymn to love and understanding, but it is also a lesson about the little ways any given person might contribute texture and emotion to a shared undertaking, a strong example of the Playing for Change project.

The idea for this project arose from a common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. No matter whether people come from different geographic, political, economic, spiritual or ideological backgrounds, music has the universal power to transcend and unite us as one human race.

The Playing for Change producers traveled the world, over the course of several years, from Santa Monica, California, to Barcelona, to Johannesburg, Chennai, New Orleans, Kathmandu, Dharamsala, Tel Aviv and other cities. They stitched together the instrumentation and the voices of performers around the world to create composite folk symphonies, a chorus of voices offering up the idea that the world can come together in good feeling.

Their aim was to “break down boundaries and overcome distances between people”, recognizing that “music has the universal power to transcend and unite us as one human race.” This video brings together musicians from around the world, but also shows many of them playing in the performance-intense streets at the heart of Barcelona’s old city or Casc Antic.

The first of a series of songs mixed together from musicians around the world, for the documentary Playing for Change: Peace Through Music. According to the Playingforchange.com website:

The idea for this project arose from a common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. No matter whether people come from different geographic, political, economic, spiritual or ideological backgrounds, music has the universal power to transcend and unite us as one human race.

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The producers traveled the world, over the course of several years, from Santa Monica, California, to Barcelona, to Johannesburg, Chennai, New Orleans, Kathmandu, Dharamsala, Tel Aviv and other cities. They stitched together the instrumentation and the voices of performers around the world to create composite folk symphonies, a chorus of voices offering up the idea that the world can come together in good feeling.