“Nobody has to know the moral of my show,” Esperanza Spalding sings on ‘Funk the Fear’, and fusillades of fresh information make it difficult to get your head around this handbrake turn in her career. Emily is the middle name Spalding went by as a child, and an alternative persona which she says forcefully appeared to her one day, demanding expression. Though jazz is no stranger to alter egos – see Sun Ra – the conceit is more familiar from recent R&B stars such as Beyoncé (who took the role of Sasha Fierce) and Mariah Carey (aka both Mimi and Bianca). Spalding’s intent is more humbly artistic, trying, as ‘Good Lava’ suggests, to release dammed-up creative streams from her lonely childhood. Cream’s jazz-rock power trio are the musical template, but the result resembles Prince much more closely, with Matthew Stevens’ sparingly distorted guitar less important than vocal harmonies. Co-producer Tony Visconti, vital to David Bowie’s chameleon turns, helps build a stereo sound-world in which voices echo, soar, accelerate and overlay. It’s like being stung by a butterfly-floating Muhammad Ali. Spalding’s lithe bass is sometimes the mix’s still centre. But it’s her elastically vaulting, huskily dipping vocal which will make fans of her plainly jazz work purr. She also hints at wider American repressions when she sings on ‘Noble Nobles’: “Talking founding fathers with a free philosophy/Don’t mention me or the stain of red blood on their hands at all”. “Savages,” she adds, the otherwise airily smooth voice roughly burning. ‘Farewell Dolly’ is all Broadway phrasing, Anthony Newley’s bratty ‘I Want It Now’ more so. Like most concept albums, it doesn’t all work, the density of detail obscuring her thrust. But this break with expectations honours her jazz roots as much as anything she’s done.