CURATION
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from this page:
by Augmented Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Becca Stevens
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City/Place:
Brooklyn, NY
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Country:
United States
Life
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Bio:
Since making her debut with the 2008 album Tea By Sea, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Becca Stevens has tested the limits of musical identity, mining everything from jazz to Irish folk to indie-rock in her striving for complete and authentic expression. In her latest musical endeavor—the five-track EP WONDERBLOOM and a soon-to-follow full-length of the same name—the North Carolina-bred, Brooklyn-based artist again defies all expectation, this time dreaming up a groove-heavy, dance-ready sound infused with elements of pop and funk and R&B. But despite its brighter textures and uptempo rhythms, WONDERBLOOM finds Stevens achieving a profound complexity in her lyrics, ultimately redefining what’s possible in creating music that elevates and edifies.
Centered on the captivating vocal presence she’s showcased as a member of David Crosby’s Lighthouse Band, WONDERBLOOM telegraphs an unabashed joy that Stevens partly attributes to the project’s production. In a bold new turn for her musical career, Stevens co-produced and co-engineered WONDERBLOOM alongside Nic Hard (Snarky Puppy, Ghost-Note, The Church), overseeing every aspect of the recording and claiming a sense of agency that had long eluded her in the studio. “Nic and I truly worked as equals, trusting each other to get the job done, and it was an incredibly empowering experience for me,” she says.
In another major departure, Stevens purposely brought a communal sensibility to the making of WONDERBLOOM—an undertaking that resulted in more than 40 musicians contributing to the album, including Vulfpeck guitarist Cory Wong, longtime collaborator Jacob Collier, and all of her Lighthouse bandmates (keyboardist Michelle Willis, Snarky Puppy bandleader Michael League, and David Crosby himself). “My earlier records were all written by me, arranged by me, then performed by me and my band,” says Stevens. “But going into making this one, I made a rule for myself that anytime I had the instinct to turn inward and tough it alone, to instead stay open and share the process. And each time I did that, I was rewarded tenfold by what we all created together. Even with so many collaborators, the end result feels more honest than ever.”
In selecting songs from the dozens of demos she’d recorded in recent years, Stevens landed on 14 tracks rooted in her finely detailed, emotionally layered storytelling. “Some of the stories are very personal, some are from other people’s lives, and the rest are a bit more like fantasy,” she says. Co-written with Grammy-nominated musician Kaveh Rastegar, WONDERBLOOM’s lead single “Good Stuff” represents the album’s autobiographical component, emerging as a distinctly timely anthem. “It’s a song about things I’ve gone through in my career, and the struggles that so many women face in this industry,” Stevens says. Proving her ingenuity as a songwriter and performer, Stevens transforms those struggles into a triumphant pop epic, channeling a radiant confidence in her vocal delivery and embedding the song with soul-stirring gospel harmonies - which is actually just 64 layers of Michael Mayo singing in 50 different personalities/vocal timbres.
A far more darkly toned track, “I Will Avenge You” shows the immense depth of Stevens’s imagination. “That was inspired by a script that Michael Showalter sent me for a pilot he was directing/producing called ‘In The Dark,’ explains Stevens, referring to the actor/producer who directed the Oscar-nominated 2017 film The Big Sick. “The show is about an alcoholic/self-destructive blind woman who’s determined to solve the murder of a young drug dealer who saved her life.” With its jagged guitar work and mesmerizing vocal performance, “I Will Avenge You” attains a cinematic intensity all on its own, gracefully unfolding as a narrative of irrepressible power and raging passion.
While much of WONDERBLOOM embodies the sheer effervescence of tracks like “Good Stuff,” the album ends on the heavy-hearted meditation of “Heather’s Letters to Her Mother” - a beautifully slow-building piece written for Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed while peacefully protesting at the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville. “David Crosby and I were on the tour bus one day, and he challenged me to find a song in the moment when Heather met the driver of the car that took her life… that these two humans should have met in some other way… any other way,” Stevens remembers. “After trying a thousand approaches to the song, I ended up thinking of the lyrics as little messages from Heather to her mother, leading up to the event and then finally from beyond the grave asking her mother to finish what she started.” Quietly heartbreaking and ineffably tender, the starkly arranged six-minute track takes on a subtle hope as a choir of children (including Stevens’s nieces and nephews, Hard’s teenage daughters, Crosby, Willis and Michael “Maz” Maher) lend their voices to the song’s breathtaking finale.
All throughout WONDERBLOOM, Stevens imbues her songs with unfiltered emotion, an effect achieved through equal parts spontaneity and intentionality. “From the beginning I set a goal for myself to be more direct, both lyrically and musically,” she says. “I have a tendency to overthink and over-edit, but for this record I really challenged myself to just say what I wanted to say and leave it at that.” Driven by a desire to “create music that allows and inspires me to be real, raw, and human when I perform it,” Stevens sometimes introduced a deliberate physicality into her performance. In recording the album-opening “Low on Love,” for instance, she conjured the track’s delicate ennui by lying down on the studio floor. “I was depressed and run ragged when I recorded my original home demo, so it felt right to get back to that energy tracking the song in the studio,” says Stevens.
Although most of WONDERBLOOM came to life in Brooklyn, Stevens journeyed to Los Angeles, North Carolina, and France in order to capture certain performances. Those travels included a trip to Paris to work with harpist Laura Perrudin, where the two musicians spent five days holed up in Perrudin’s apartment. “Laura is like some kind of mad-scientist fairy,” Stevens says. “She’d sit there turning knobs on her pedals, then take a shish-kebab skewer and put it to the strings and whack it with a padded drumstick, and suddenly it sounded like Satan’s cocktail party or something. “Laura created so many other worldly sounds like nothing I’d ever heard before.”
In reflecting on the six-month-long process of recording and producing WONDERBLOOM, Stevens recalls the relentless focus and often 18-hour workday with an unequivocal fondness. To that end, the album’s title nods to the Titan Arum, a plant whose singularly massive cluster of flowers takes a staggering eight years to blossom. “What inspires me about the Titan Arum is how hard it works and how long it takes to bloom, and how beautiful the payoff is,” says Stevens. “It’s about working for the long game rather than instant gratification, and resisting that temptation to get hung up on all the little things on the way to something great.”
For Stevens, the most glorious payoff in WONDERBLOOM lies in her utter delight in the album’s outcome. “This is the first record that I feel inspired to dance to, and I think that has everything to do with how much I shared the experience as I went along,” she reveals. And with the release of WONDERBLOOM, Stevens hopes that her audience might feel a similar lightening of the spirit. “I feel very strongly that music is a lifting force, and that many people don’t realize how deeply we need that right now,” she says. “I would love for people to have fun to this album, and to enjoy it in happy times and in sad times—the same way I find strength in all my favorite records.”
Clips (more may be added)
The Integrated Global Creative Economy
Wolfram Mathematics
This technological matrix originating in Bahia, Brazil and positioning creators around the world within reach of each other and the entire planet is able to do so because it is small-world (see Wolfram).
Bahia itself, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other place on earth throughout all of human history, refuge for Lusitanian Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition, Indigenous both apart and subsumed into a brilliant sociocultural matrix comprised of these three peoples and more, is small-world.
Human society, the billions of us in all the complexity of our relationships, is small-world. Neural structures for human memory are small-world, neural structures in artificial intelligence are small-world...
In small worlds great things are possible. In a matrix they can be created.
Alicia Svigals
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (JOHANNESBURG): piano, Blue Note recording artist
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"Very nice! Thank you for this. Warmest regards and wishing much success for the project! Matt"
—Son of Jimmy Garrison (bass for John Coltrane, Bill Evans...); plays with Herbie Hancock and other greats...
Dear friends & colleagues,
Having arrived in Salvador 13 years earlier, I opened a record shop in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for Bahian musicians, many of them magisterial but unknown.
David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR found us (above), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Bahians and other Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix (people who have passed are not removed), then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd (for his rights in Bob Marley compositions; Clement was Bob's first producer), Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein (managed The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles) called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Recent access to this matrix and Bahia are from these places (a single marker can denote multiple accesses).
Across the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
For a complete list of everybody inside, tap TOTAL below:
TOTAL
Nduduzo Makhathini
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Matt Garrison
RÁDIO MATRIX