Berklee College of Music alumni have collectively won more than 300 Grammys so far. Two of those previous winners, esperanza spalding and Jett Galindo, are up for awards again at this year’s Grammys.

Jazz bassist spalding is nominated for best jazz vocal album with “Milton + Esperanza,” a collaboration with jazz vocalist Milton Nascimento.

“Milton is one of the most important figures in music to me, and has been since I first heard him my first year at Berklee,” splanding told Under the Radar host Callie Crossley.

splanding, who graduated from Berklee in 2005, first met Nascimento in 2009 and kept in touch, she said.

“Then in 2022 his son, really out of the blue, just said, ‘Hey, do you want to come – you want to produce this record for my father? I think the next record he should do would be you and him, and you produce it,'” splanding said. “And I said, ‘Yes.’ And here you have this: what I hope is a portrait of our deep love for the magic of music, our deep love for each other and definitely for the potential of intergenerational collaboration.”

Galindo, a mastering engineer and 2012 Berklee graduate, is nominated for best global music album; best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media (“Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora”); and for her work on Billie Eilish’s album “Hit Me Hard And Soft,” which got nods for the best record, album, song, and pop vocal album.

“As a music lover and someone who enjoys music from all genres, to be able to work with creators from all these different genres is just so fulfilling to me,” Galindo said. “Another album that I had the honor of mastering this year is nominated for the best global music album category, which is Matt B’s ‘Alkebulan [II.]’ So to have worked on pop records, global music and video games, it’s very fulfilling as a mastering engineer. And I never take for granted that privilege of just collaborating with amazing artists on a daily basis.”

spalding, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, said coming to Berklee opened up so many possibilities for her.

“I never had visions or plans of going beyond Portland in a serious way. So all of a sudden this whole world opened up to me,” spalding said. “Suddenly I was meeting people from Argentina and Nigeria and parts of the United State I’ve never been to before, and from Brazil, from Japan, from China. And that sense of like, ‘Whoa, we are in like a global constellation.’”

Galindo said she grew up in a musical family that didn’t stick to one genre.

“My parents, their bread and butter in the Philippines was teaching and managing cover bands. And that’s just what I grew up in,” Galindo said. “When I went to school, I got serious with choral music. So it’s this duality of classical and modern music that meant so much to me. And Berklee really was that place that was able to bring all those musical cultures together.”

GUESTS

  • esperanza spalding , five-time Grammy-award winning bassist, singer, songwriter and composer whose latest album, “Milton + Esperanza,” is nominated for best jazz vocal album at the 2025 Grammys. She is also a member of the Berklee Class of 2005.
  • Jett Galindo , Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer and vinyl cutter whose work is nominated for four Grammys this year, including album of the year. She is a governor on the Recording Academy’s LA Chapter Board, a board member of Women in Vinyl, and a 2012 graduate of Berklee.