2018 · Album
12 Little Spells
Concord Records · Released: October 19, 2018 · Album Number: Seventh studio album
Twelve Incantations, Released One by One
Spalding cast these spells individually across two weeks, each with its own video, before gathering them whole.
By 2018, Esperanza Spalding had already built a career that moved fluidly between jazz, pop, R&B, and Brazilian music—enough stylistic territory that you couldn't pin her down to a single sound. 12 Little Spells, her seventh studio album, leans into that refusal to stay put. What made this release distinct was its rollout: rather than dropping all at once, Spalding released each of the twelve tracks individually between October 7 and 18, 2018, each one paired with its own music video. That kind of staggered release was unusual for a jazz album—more common in hip-hop and pop at the time—and it changed how people could encounter the music. Instead of sitting down with a full album, listeners got a daily spell cast their way, one small piece at a time.
The album came out on Concord Records, a label with deep jazz roots, but that doesn't mean 12 Little Spells sounds like traditional jazz. Spalding's work had been moving toward something more contemporary and genre-fluid for years. This record continues that trajectory without apology. The individual video releases hint at an artist thinking about visual presentation alongside the audio, treating each track as its own complete idea rather than part of a larger suite. It's an approach that treats listeners as people who might discover the album in fragments, on social media or YouTube, rather than as committed listeners working through a traditional album format from top to bottom.
If you've heard Spaling's earlier work and want to understand where she was heading in the late 2010s, this album is a reasonable entry point. It's not her peak—that probably came earlier, in the middle of the last decade—but it shows someone still willing to experiment with how music gets made and shared. The album didn't redefine her career or shift the jazz landscape; it was simply a solid project from an artist who had already proven she could do nearly anything she wanted.
