As a singer/songwriter working at the cusp of jazz, Appalachian folk and indie rock, Becca Stevens has always drawn on a deep reservoir of emotion to fuel her music.
But her new album “Maple to Paper” emerged from far more visceral experiences than her previous work, passages that began to unfold in the solitude of the pandemic. Marked by profound grief and close observation of her roiling inner life, the music is both raw and exquisitely crafted with the concision of Emily Dickinson verse.
“Writing and recording this music, I was pregnant twice, bookended by the experience of losing my mom,” said Stevens, 41. “Four days after I gave birth to my second daughter, I finished the recording.”
Returning to the Bay Area for her first run of gigs in about a decade, the two-time Grammy nominee performs four shows at the SFJAZZ Center Oct. 14-15, followed by concerts at Kuumbwa Jazz Center Oct. 16 and San Jose Jazz’s Break Room Oct. 17.
She’s performing solo, which is how she wrote and recorded “Maple to Paper,” a stark contrast to her usual immersion in the recording process. “I tend to get carried away with all the possibilities that recording can bring, overdubs and layers,” she said. “I chose to resist that and put all of my energy into the writing and finding the character for each song.”
The results are striking, with songs that feel like complete, albeit abbreviated narratives delivered with her trademark crystalline vocals and expert guitar accompaniment. With a dozen new originals, the album’s only ringer is the concluding version of “Rainbow Connection,” a song she sings (and whistles) to her daughters.
The recent tectonic shifts Stevens’ experienced extended to her musical family, with the early 2023 death of two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee David Crosby, with whom she toured widely in his Lighthouse Band and forged a close songwriting collaboration. While “Maple to Paper” is her ninth release under her own name, she’s a prolific and much sought-after collaborator.
Stevens has recorded with Snarky Puppy and harmonic explorer Jacob Collier, the band Kneebody and with pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Esperanza Spalding and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who’s described her as “someone who everybody, in my generation at least, looks up to. She’s really a genius.”
She’s been a central part of Menlo Park-reared pianist Taylor Eigsti’s musical world, contributing to both of his Grammy Award-winning albums, 2021’s “Tree Falls” and 2024’s “Plot Armor” (which like “Maple to Paper” was released on Snarky Puppy’s label GroundUP Music).
“Collaboration is a life force for me,” Stevens said. “There’s so much energy and joy that comes from being around people. I’m so hungry for collaboration, to have that feeling of our art being witnessed.”
It was while recording Snarky Puppy’s album “Family Dinner, Vol. 2” in 2015 that she first met Crosby, whose storied career with the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash was finally getting back on track after decades of drug-fueled self-sabotage. Impressed by her voice, he approached Stevens about writing together.
A few days later he sent her a big folder of unused lyrics with a note urging her to pick one and create a song. “I sat there for a few minutes wondering ‘Am I really going to do this?’” she said. “I took the plunge and did a setting for ‘By the Light of Common Day,’ which we recorded on the ‘Lighthouse’ album.”
The track also featured Snarky Puppy multi-instrumentalist and producer Michael League and Michelle Willis, and it launched them as David Crosby and the Lighthouse Band. The collaboration flourished and led quickly to 2017’s “Sky Trails” and 2018’s “Here If You Listen.”
Crosby took to describing Willis and Stevens as his “big sisters,” and seemed to love that Stevens hadn’t grown up listening to the era-defining hits featuring his angelic tenor.
“There was so much joy and laughter between all of us,” Stevens said. “He just felt like a family member to me. I never knew him not sober. I never knew him not creating this torrential rainstorm of new work. One of his biggest regrets was not being sober more. That’s when he could find the muse more readily.”
Pivoting from the Lighthouse family to working and performing solo means giving up the camaraderie and support, but as she finishes this run she’s relishing the freedom to stretch rhythm and dynamics that performing alone afford.
“If I’m playing solo and the room is feeling really intimate and I’m feeling very tender, I can go to a different space,” she said. “I find myself telling more stories because solo performances feel a little bit heavier. The chatting in between can inject a little lightness.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
BECCA STEVENS
When & where: 7 and 8:30 p.m. Oct. 14-15 at SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco, $34; www.sfjazz.org; 7 p.m. Oct. 16 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz, $34.97-$36.75, www.kuumbwajazz.org; 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. May 23 at San Jose Jazz Break Room, San Jose, $35; sanjosejazz.org.