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Weightless (Sunnyside Records) Available April 19, 2011

March 22, 2011

Weightless (Sunnyside Records) will be available April 19th!

On such original compositions as “Weightless,” “I’ll Notice,” “Traveler’s Blessing” and “The Riddle,” Stevens’ “remarkable, soulful, pitch-perfect” (Winston-Salem Journal) vocals communicate both immense warmth and effortless urgency, while her exquisitely crafted tunes embrace inventive acoustic textures and idiosyncratic rhythmic and melodic elements. The resulting music resists easy categorization, drawing upon elements of pop, jazz and folk without limiting itself to the rules of any particular genre.

In addition to its eight original Stevens compositions, Weightless also features a quartet of distinctive reworkings of songs by other artists. Those cover tunes—The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” Animal Collective’s “My Girls” and Iron & Wine’s “Each Coming Night”—demonstrate Becca’s stylistic versatility as well as her impressive ability to find an emotional connection with material from wildly divergent sources.

Stevens, a graduate of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York, met her bandmates (Liam Robinson, accordion, keys, and vocals; Chris Tordini, bass and vocals; Jordan Perlson, drums and percussion) while attending the institution. They recorded Weightless at Manhattan’s Sear Sound with veteran producer Matt Pierson (Joshua Redman, Jane Monheit and Kirk Whalum).

Be the first to get the new album at the Album Release Event April 4th at Rockwood Music Hall, Stage 2, NYC.

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BECCA STEVENS ELICITS RAVES FROM HER PEERS; JOINS REBECCA MARTIN AND GRETCHEN PARLATO AT STANFORD JAZZ WORKSHOP

Singer-composer-guitarist Becca Stevens is a musician’s musician, whose work with her own band and collaborations with Travis Sullivan’s Bjorketra, Taylor Eigsti, Brad Mehldau and Eric Harland has won acclaim from critics and the respect and admiration of her peers.

Her singing has been described as “remarkable, soulful, pitch-perfect and subtle in its controlled acrobatics” (Winston-Salem Journal) and cited for its “no bulls**t emotional delivery” (Boston Phoenix). Weightless, her debut for Sunnyside Records, will be released on April 19.

Stevens will sing with pianist-composer Brad Mehldau at New York’s Carnegie Hall on March 11 and at Sanders Hall in Cambridge on March 12. In a recent New York Times Playlist feature, Mehldau lauded Stevens’ “take on harmony, which is really cool and unexpected,” and went on to say that “the way she’s thinking about melody is very original, with these wide leaps and chromatic dips.”

Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding has praised Stevens in a number of recent interviews, and likens her music to a “cool bubbling brook freshening the brine of all the music you’ve ever heard.”

Kurt Elling pegged Stevens as one of his favorite singers when he was interviewed on NPR’s World Café in February, calling her “just delightful” and noting that her music “goes beyond boundaries…she’s such a great songwriter, and very unique.”

For the second consecutive year, the Stanford Jazz Workshop will feature a songwriting program led by renowned singer and composer Rebecca Martin. This year, Becca Stevens will join Martin and Gretchen Parlato for the week-long workshop, which will take place in July. For more information about the program, go to http://bit.ly/dLWr5x.

Weightless includes eight original compositions and a quartet of distinctive interpretations of songs by Animal Collective, Iron & Wine, Seal and The Smiths. The music resists easy categorization and demonstrates Stevens’ stylistic versatility and impressive ability to find an emotional connection with material from wildly divergent sources.

Stevens reflects on her creative objectives: “Every day I learn from the music of composers who have come before me and on whose shoulders I stand…my focus as an artist is to cast those experiences in a musical and poetic language that will resonate with the listener and affect a moment, a day or a life.”

–Regina Joskow

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