Who teaches herself to play the violin by sitting under a piano while her mother is taking actual violin lessons? esperanza spalding, who styles her name lowercase, did this—and at five began playing professionally with Portland’s Oregon Chamber Orchestra. There she continued for 10 years, concluding her tenure in the concertmaster’s catbird seat. Today, at 42, spalding is jazz royalty, an all-time great on double bass who also sings and composes. What’s more, she’s an activist, with the courage of her deep convictions—so much so that in 2022 she resigned from her professorship at Harvard over the institution’s unaddressed, inextricable links to Black and Native subjugation. This season, spalding joins Carnegie Hall’s honor roll of artists invited to curate a Perspectives series. As such, she has carte blanche to push boundaries and make new connections as the spirit moves her. “To be at Carnegie Hall,” spalding says in a video on the institution’s Web site, “it kind of has the feeling of being in a holy place where you know that a lot of activity with a very pristine intention has happened.” For her first program, at Zankel Hall (December 18), spalding has summoned dance innovators and fellow jazz greats to help develop an “anthem” that connects city dwellers with the “natural world that sustains them.” A “Well-Being Concert” at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (March 6) focuses on the power of music and dance to sustain us in times of grief. The third and final event, on the Carnegie Hall mainstage (May 6), dives into an ocean of folk songs in search of “a more reciprocal relationship with all that nourishes us—from the lands and waters that sustain our bodies, to the labor upon which our cities and collective dreams rely.” —Matthew Gurewitsch