Becca Stevens on Popping Jazz Boundaries

Songwriter and artist Becca Stevens is one of three exquisite singers who make up the cooperative trio Tillery. Along with Gretchen Parlato and Rebecca Martin, Stevens has crafted a debut recording that slips gleefully and artfully through the gaps between folk, pop, jazz, and probably other genres. Released only digitally (and available here), it’s a record that will make less of a stir than Stevens’ own Becca Stevens Band records, of which there are now three, and certainly less excitement than Snarky Puppy’s recent Family Dinner, Volume 2, on which Stevens stole the show with a stunning lead-off track she wrote, “I Asked”.

Tillery, however, is beautiful and subtle, a slippery blend of three distinctive voices and three different songwriting sensibilities. Parlato loves texture and rhythm, and her songs tend to layer handclaps, vocal pops and crooning “oohs” that float into undulating melodies. Stevens writes tunes with a plainspoken clarity and melodic power. Stevens’ tunes may be the most distinctive and hooky: filled with snaking licks, poetic lyrics, and stuttering rhythms that seem to build upon your own heartbeat.

Tilley opens their debut, however, with a cover of “Take Me With U”, from Prince’s Purple Rain, showing a cool facility with rethinking a song that’s already a classic. They also cover a Jacksons song and one by Father John Misty. The accompaniment is spare: guitars and ukulele from Stevens and Martin, body percussion, and a dash of bass and drums (almost unnoticeable) on a tune or two.

How did the trio assemble? Each is based (loosely) in the New York area, and each has a pedigree as a jazz singer, though Tillery is a far cry from a straight “jazz” record. Still, Martin has sung with no less a jazz master than Paul Motian, Parlato won the 2004 Thelonious Monk Jazz Vocal competition and regularly covers songs by the likes of Herbie Hancock. Stevens, like Parlato, has a background in jazz education and has recorded with Brad Mehldau, Esperanza Spalding, Snarky Puppy, and Ambrose Akinmusire. Their common background in jazz — and their common breaking of boundaries away from jazz in any pure sense — drew them to each other’s gigs and homes. The band, and the debut record, reflect the women’s friendship as much as anything. It sounds like it was recorded in a living room or on a porch. It’s intimate.

To learn more about Tillery, PopMatters spoke with Stevens, who’s arguably the most interesting singer who might be loosely associated with jazz in 2016. Stevens has a regular band that records her always arresting story-songs. The band’s most recent album, Perfect Animal, contains two songs also on Tillery, set in a folk / rock / jazz context that allows them to mingle with a cover of “Higher Love” as well as a Frank Ocean tune and Usher’s “You Make Me Wanna”.

Stevens is seemingly everywhere at the same time. She’s on two tracks of Snarky Puppy’s Family Dinner Volume Two (and the best ones, both also on Perfect Animal), she stole the show on Akinmusire’s second Blue Note album with “Our Basement (Ed)”, a haunting tone poem, and guests with many other genuine artists who are looking for a vocal presence that simultaneously suggests adventure and emotional focus. In each of her incarnations, Stevens embodies what might be the very best elements of jazz today. Her music uses rhythmic complexity and harmonic complexity, but every song is strong as a melodic and lyric form.

Her voice, like that of her Tillery bandmates and heroes of her such as Bjork and Joni, is impossible to miss once you’ve heard it. Though she has obviously been influenced by Appalachian folk, Joni Mitchell, and Stevie Wonder as much as any pure “jazz” musician, she thrives in musical settings where there’s a conversation going on in the moment. Her music breathes the way a Mingus bass line breathes. It’s pliant like Ella Fitzgerald without having any of the trappings of jazz from 50 years ago.

In our hour-plus long conversation, we tried to pin down this elusive way in which her music and Tillery’s music is infused with “jazz” without really embodying that genre. Stevens is honest, humble, and charming, and almost painfully articulate about the struggle of being dedicated to making art music in 2016 in the face of an industry that can’t do much to support talented people with their own vision. Not that she wouldn’t like to “make it” but, as she eloquently put it, “in the end, if the choice is between great music and money, you could ask me a million times a day and the answer would always be the same. Music. That’s where the heart is, where the joy is.”

Here is our conversation.

Let’s start with the classic unanswerable question. It used to be, what does it mean to be a “jazz” singer? Now, maybe, it’s: What does it mean that you, Gretchen, and Rebecca are all singers who were trained, formally and informally, as “jazz” singers but are now making music that is beyond category? Tillery isn’t jazz. But it’s not pop or rock or whatever, either. It is, however, some kind of art music, and American art music, well, that brings us back to jazz … or something.

It’s a tricky question. It’s feels like trying to describe something that’s not terribly definable. The way I’ve thought of that is: studying jazz gave me the most freedom within the art form of music. Studying in a jazz capacity felt really liberating. The boundaries of jazz are cloudier than any other genre. From there you can go into any different genre without people blinking an eye.

That all three of us came from that world is partly how we came together. The fact that Rebecca and Gretchen and I all came from that world was actually part of what brought us together. We all separately have influences beyond the world of jazz — the music that we grew up on, the music that inspires us now, it doesn’t matter the genre. When we got together, we were coming from that limitless grab bag that is jazz that gives you expansive harmonic and rhythmic knowledge.

Jazz was always a hybrid form, scooping in influence from Afro-Cuban music, from Brazilian music, from rock.

If you think about the Great American Songbook, one of the common threads is that the songs are strong melodies, strong songs. It’s popular music, but it’s using all those things you just mentioned. That heritage comes with it — those beautiful, leaping melodies, the complex harmonies, the beautiful rhythms. It’s like classical music in a way, but they are songs.

We all had that knowledge already built into our stories as human beings, and it make our coming together that much more effortless and cohesive. When we took a song that we all liked, whether it was a song by Prince or the Jacksons or one of own, we were coming from this really open-minded perspective. Those jazz practices were a big part of what was on our collective tool belt.

I’m not talking about Tillery now, but I want to ask you about “Our Basement”, your song from Ambrose Akinmusere’s 2014 recording and another piece of art music. Maybe it’s just because of the primacy of the trumpet solo there, but this does seem like jazz. Maybe the reason is not so much the trumpet improvising, per se, but the fact that we hear very keenly on this recording an interaction between two voices that are listening to each other.

Ooooh, I like that theory. I also think people are going to consider music to be in the genre that they associate the performers with. No matter how “rocky” an album I make, I’m going to wind up in jazz magazines just because of the people I have collaborated with. I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily, but it’s something to be aware of. Ambrose is mainly known as a jazz trumpeter and is recording on Blue Note, he’s going to have trouble avoiding the word “jazz” no matter what he’s playing. And also … where else are you going to put that music?

But there’s something about that song beyond it not being “pop music” that makes it like jazz. There are moments when you and Ambrose are interacting in real time, listening to each other. There’s something about the vocabulary of that music, of “jazz”, that coded into your vocabulary, whatever we choose to call it.

You’ve hit on something very important there. At times in my life, I have taken that for granted. Even if I’m not playing straight-ahead jazz, I find that I collaborate with jazz musicians, whether it’s Taylor Eigsti or Brad Mehldau who may be doing other things but are coming from that upbringing. Then I’ll have an alternate experience with people who are in the pop realm or the classical realm and it becomes obvious to me that there’s a comfort with uncertainty in jazz, this embracing or acceptance of the unknown. I don’t know if it’s a personality type and that’s why you’re drawn to “jazz” or if it’s from being placed in those settings over and over again and so it’s easy for you to let go. But that is something I’ve noticed in the moment before.

You don’t have to brand things so much for it to be a bit of jazz — here’s the solo section with one person improvising. But maybe you don’t have to plan an ending and you can leave room in the song for things to percolate and be what they are going to be in that moment.

I love the moment in “Our Basement” toward the end where you and Ambrose are playing a note in unison and then one of your rises slightly as the other sings or plays sliding down just a bit. The song is about two people who know or care for each other but are missing each other, coming apart, and that moment is metaphorically perfect for the lyric.

When Ambrose asked me to write that song, his only suggestion was that it come from the point of view of a homeless person. So, my wheels starting turning and I came up with this story of a homeless man who used to have a comfortable life and a wife. In the beginning of the song he’s on the street. He’s lost his job and his wife, but he’s still in love with her. I always imagined that maybe he lost everything because of a drug or alcohol problem. I allude to that in the lyric, “and now I’m higher than the streetlights fading on beneath the night’s sky” or “no drug can escape this relentless heat”.

So then he sees or imagines seeing her walk past. His days are spent seeing if they will cross paths. It’s a song about paths diverging, and it’s supposed to song like someone overtaken by a drug-induced fog. There’s something dissonant and creepy about it that makes you feel that you’re walking through a bad dream. And, yes, it was on the fly — it wasn’t planned at all.

Maybe we hear that on the Tillery recording, too. I’m thinking of that start to “I Asked” on the new record — with the ukulele, the finger snaps, the incredibly pliant sense of rhythm there. And I’m weirdly not sure about this, but we hear the first line sung by Gretchen, then second by Rebecca, and only then you, is that right? Talk about that example as having an approach to music making that we wouldn’t hear from pop singers in 2016 — voices pliantly interacting.

I could hear that as a kind of folk thing, too. You hear folks like Emmylou Harris and Graham Nash, people sharing the melody in country music, taking turns on different parts of the melody. But I can see what you’re saying. It could be applied to world music, too. No matter how you slice it, music is all connected. If somebody is existing completely within any one genre, I tip my hat to them, but when you think about it, it’s not really possible. Each genre is coming from another genre and leading to another. You exist somewhere in that continuum with your music.

I think there’s an argument that, within your generation, it’s harder than ever to wall yourself off in one genre. The access to recordings from all over the world and from every genre is unparalleled.

You can find similarities between good music — between jazz and hip-hop, hip-hop and country. I recently did a project with a friend that found connections between ancient traditional Japanese music and Irish folk music. Even a thousand years ago, there were scales that existed in Japan that also existed continents away. Maybe this stuff, this great music, is coming from God or from people selling silk to each other, but it’s all connected and it always has been.

Everything’s Golden

Let’s talk about that song a bit more. It’s on your recent Becca Stevens Band record, it’s on the Snarky Puppy record, it’s here. It’s irresistible and simple and adaptable. What are the bones of that song, musically? What makes it work so many different ways? I don’t even understand what time signature it’s in.

It’s in four-four. Well, yeah, except that part that’s in five — two and three. But the gimmick of the song — the part that people walk away with — is the hook line “whatever makes you happy” or the “um-hmmm”. When I first wrote it, the focus was on writing a really simple lyric that was almost a folk-country tune. It was more upbeat, but when I slowed it down it got “Mm-hmmm”, and that became the glue that pulled everything together. It set up that sexy, rubbery bass line part without set pitches. It’s catching in way, because it’s light-hearted. It’s very human. The “um-hmmmm” is this mundane sound, but it can be made interesting. It’s sexy, it’s familiar, it’s used in all cultures.

One of my favorite things about the Tillery version of “I Asked” is that the “Mm-hmmm” is really exposed. The really intricate, human-sounding rhythms on that track are all made by the human body– except for the bass drum, which was played by Gretchen’s husband, the drummer Mark Guiliana.

Most of the instrumental backing here is Rebecca’s guitar and your ukulele, is that right? You have drums and some production on “Sweetheart”, but it’s rare here. This makes the recording feel like we’re just hanging out with you guys, almost peeking into a living room. Talk about the decision to keep things simple. And talk about the decision to add more here and there — why just a little?

We wanted to focus on a very natural approach. We recorded everything live and together, without isolation — standing together in a room, nothing separating us. There were few fixes that could be done afterward. The only overdubbing was vocal doubling or me adding a stringed instrument or some body percussion. We also recorded to tape and mixed it live on a board rather than on Pro Tools. Not much editing could be done. Everything was super natural and organic, for lack of a better word.

The arranging of the vocals was also very loose. We didn’t ask, “What would be the jazz approach” — we just tried what seemed cool.

It was the same on “Sweetheart”. At first it seemed a bit “dirgey”, so we added “the husbands” (Guiliana and bassist Larry Grenadier, who’s married to Rebecca Martin). We talked about having a band on every song, but ultimately we agreed that we wanted the record to focus on the three of us and what we do in a live setting.

I believe there’s something incredible going on now in New York (and I’m sure elsewhere) with musicians who are no longer chasing a Big Label Contract — since these things don’t really exist any more — or some kind of stardom. It seems like hugely talented people are now making music with virtually no sense of compromise or “commercial” calculation. The result is an incredible variety of great music that pays little attention to boundaries. You seem like an example of that.

You mention the downfall of the industry. Which sucks. We’re in place now where we are at the bottom of the totem pole. No ones makes money from recording any more. It costs money to create it and we don’t make any of it back. But the silver lining, as you said is that with it being impossible to get a $100,000 record deal now, people are just making the music they want make. No one is saying, Okay, I’ll give you $100,000, let’s make this record together but you should use this producer and record it this way at this studio, and we need five songs that can sell on the radio. That’s not happening much anymore.

Even on your recent Becca Stevens Band record, which is relatively more “poppy”, the music still feel sounds idiosyncratic. It’s your band with your sensibility. It sounds like the product of one person’s imagination.

Because that’s what it was. I was planning to put out the new record independently. I didn’t approach Universal until long after it had been mixed, mastered, and packaged. They had nothing to do with any of the decisions I made with regard to that record.

It seems like in the current environment, no one is even trying to “make it” any more. Everyone is just making the music they want to make.

I wouldn’t say that! Every person in Tillery — and even Tillery as band — has courted and has been courted by big labels. We’ve been intrigued and tempted to do it, and probably would have, had it worked out. You’re making it sound like we’re these heroes that don’t have any ego or desire for more success.

Why didn’t it work out, then?

It’s a different story for each of us. I just went through the same thing with my record. In Tillery’s case, maybe I’m proving your point. We said, “This isn’t worth it.” It started to seem like we were going to be asked to change the sound of the record that was already made. We believed in it and were not willing to change the music.

What it would take to please a bigger record label is a distance we wouldn’t travel. If someone were to say, I’ll give you a million dollars but I’m going to tell you what song to write or others will write them for you, and we’ll tell you how to dress, and we promise to make you famous — I wouldn’t even have to think about that. That would be death.

If it were 1975 again, somehow, it seems like Tillery and its members would be Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro and Ricki Lee Jones, maybe. That reduces you guys to comparison, which I know is unfair, but it says something about the environment in which a creative singer and songwriter now operates. Those were three incredible, creative artists who got amazing major label support back then. Those records sound awesome. But today if you sound like that, well, you’re a “jazz musician” and you’re outside the mainstream.

With all three of those incredible women that you mentioned, they played with jazz people. Ricki Lee actually made a jazz record, and Joni recorded with Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Brian Blade, Michael Brecker — and that music is a hundred times jazzier than the Tillery record, but they weren’t considered jazz. Joni’s earliest associations were with folk, so she was always considered in that realm even though she made a record with Charles Mingus. Her music spanned way beyond any one genre.

Talk a bit about the group’s decision to record “Take Me with U”, and to make it the first track. The song absolutely works here, but it really stands out as somewhat different. Why that song?

It was Gretchen’s idea to try that one. It’s my favorite song from Purple Rain. She brought it up and we were like, “Hell yeah!” We were at Rebecca’s house sitting around and arranged it on the spot. We thought we should try a cover and we were literally going through iTunes trying to find something that inspired all of us. Gretchen and I are both huge Prince fans.

It wasn’t my first choice to make it first on the record, but it has a catchy tempo, it’s light-hearted. Yet it carries some weight. So, why not?

What does it mean for you to have to make enough money from your art to get by? You seem like you are everywhere right now, collaborating with lots of folks, becoming a real entrepreneur rather than focusing only on the music. How do you pull off that balance and still have time to live and grow? Being an artist there days — especially one tarnished with the word “jazz” — can’t be easy.

I’m flattered that you think I’m pulling it off. As I talk to you I’m literally pacing the hallways of a hospital, visiting my sister. Stressed out from doing too many things. I often feel like I’m not pulling it off. I’ve never been able to say “no” to things that I really want to do.

This career is my dream. Every little thing that comes up can be amazing. Like you suggested, there’s this beautiful golden era of musicians in New York. I’m in what feels like a golden period of my life. There are so many incredible opportunities.

Earlier in my career, I did everything, but now I can pick and choose to do the ones that serve my spiritual mission. It’s really hard work, the traveling, the interviews, and getting it all done. But it’s such good work. It’s so fulfilling. Even when I’m exhausted, I think, how would I feel if I couldn’t do this? And I have an incredible team — a manager, friends and family.

The big thing is to practice staying in the moment as much as possible. If you get overwhelmed, you take a breath and try again. Or try again the next day.

Do you have other stuff you do to make the rent? Teaching?

That’s tricky. With my band, there’s so much overhead with taking them on the road, paying for their hotels, their fee, whatever else. Then there are the percentages that go to agencies and management. When all is said and done, I’m lucky to break even when I’m traveling with my band. It’s much better when we go overseas. Sometimes I’ll have a bad month, then a good month. You have to think big picture; I think, well, this is an investment.

But I get really lucrative work as teacher overseas, and I do private lessons in my home. Mostly people coming from overseas who reach out to me. I’ve done teaching at the Manhattan School of Music and the New School. Overseas I’ve done master classes, jazz summer schools, and songwriting camps. Tillery is going for a weeklong songwriting event in Portugal soon.

The sideman work is the best because somebody is paying for your flight and your hotel. Sometimes I don’t even have to bring a guitar — I just bring a dress and microphone and sing my heart out. I wouldn’t want it to always be that way, but that mixed with my own band is a really nice balance. I like to get back to my voice which, for me, is my oldest relationship to music.

But in the end, if the choice is between great music and money, you could ask me a million times a day and the answer would always be the same. Music. That’s where the heart is, where the joy is.

What’s your next project?

In one month I’m going into the studio to record Regina, my next project with my band made up of songs inspired by the word “queen”. My band will be on the record with special guests like David Crosby, Jacob Collier, and others. I’ll be recording it in London with a producer there and then in New York. Mike League from Snarky Puppy night be doing some production. It’s all falling into place at the moment.

Just yesterday I decided to fund it myself so that the focus is on the music and making it the way I believe it needs to be made. That may seem obvious, but that’s something that gets lost in the struggle of trying to make it.

I love making music. I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity to do it.