Dayna Stephens joins the honor roll of Berkeley High musicians who have made the grade.
I wish I could claim I had some special talent for discovering young musicians destined to be jazz stars, but the truth is I just know where to look. As a student at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1997 working on a short video piece on the Berkeley High School jazz program, I was eager to meet the next player likely to join the ranks of Joshua Redman, Peter Apfelbaum, Benny Green, Craig Handy and Steven Bernstein. So I pulled aside longtime band director Charles Hamilton and asked him to introduce me to his best prospect. That was my first contact with tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens. A pudgy senior with a serious bent, he already possessed a big, burnished tone and the dogged work ethic that jazz requires. Following him to jam sessions at Oakland joints where he held his own on the bandstand with players three times his age, it quickly became clear that Stephens had immense potential.
For a young musician, however, great expectations can be a curse just as easily as a blessing, as the pressure to stand out from the pack stifles rather than stokes creativity. For Stephens, early praise paid off not in short-term bids for attention, but in sustained growth that has made him one of jazz’s most formidable young players. Rather than rushing into the studio, he’s taken his time to hone his craft as a player and composer, soaking up experience with some of the music’s deepest thinkers, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Kenny Barron.
“Dayna is a great player,” Barron said in an interview three years ago, after inviting Stephens to perform with him at Jazz at Lincoln Center. “His understanding of jazz’s language is prodigious. He’s very expressive, with a lot of emotion and feeling in his music, which is something I recognized the first time I heard him.”
Now, Stephens is a 28-year-old man with an imposing build and an abidingly sweet disposition that’s transparently discernible in his tone. He recently released his debut recording as a leader, The Timeless Now (CTA Records), and it’s the work of an artist who is speaking confidently in his own voice. “I am really proud of this album,” says Stephens, chatting after a performance at Jazz at Pearl’s in North Beach. “I feel like I really took my time to get it right. It was really difficult sometimes, wondering when it was going to come out, but now that it’s here, I feel like it really represents me at my best.”
Listeners discovering Stephens through his new album will find a player with a huge, soft, luxuriant sound that’s among the most beautiful in jazz. While he’s clearly absorbed a wide array of influences, from Stan Getz and Charlie Rouse to Joe Henderson and Mark Turner, Stephens isn’t beholden to any particular school. “That’s something I really work on,” Stephens says, “developing a tone that’s comforting and that still projects. A lot of players use an edge to their sound, but I want to project while keeping my sound wide and soft. That’s the challenge.”
Stephens’ quest is facilitated by his careful choice of collaborators. The Timeless Now, for instance, features an impressive cast, including the 22-year-old piano master Taylor Eigsti, bassist Ben Street, drummer Eric Harland, and on three tracks, guitar star John Scofield. Besides a beautiful, loping version of Ferde Grofé’s “On the Trail” and a sleek arrangement of the standard “But Beautiful,” Stephens supplied all the album’s compositions. Whether offering an ingenious Cubist restructuring of Thelonious Monk’s “Evidence” (“Smoking Gun”) or the beatific extended lines of “Teeth,” he’s developed an expansive harmonic vocabulary that’s both welcoming and highly personal.
“He’s strongly influenced by Wayne Shorter, but in a young generational sense,” says Harland, a brilliant drummer heard frequently in the Bay Area through his work with the SFJAZZ Collective. “Wayne is the master of harmonic phrases and blending harmonic cycles. He uses harmonics to tell a story. Dayna has really tapped into that. His tunes are so strong and he’s really developing his voice harmonically. I always like it when I hear someone who’s so different they’re not in a category. It’s a breath of fresh air.”
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Richmond and El Cerrito, Stephens started gaining notice while attending Alameda High School. When the school’s band director quit at the beginning of his junior year, Stephens and a friend took over the ensemble and ran it for the year by themselves. Looking for more rigorous musical training, he transferred to Berkeley High his senior year, and quickly became one of the jazz program’s leading lights. Stephens won a full scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and then earned a spot in the rigorous Thelonious Monk Institute at the University of Southern California by auditioning for Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Terence Blanchard, who runs the program.
Since graduating from the two-year Monk Institute program in 2003, Stephens has been dividing his time between the Bay Area and New York City, where he’s making a name for himself through his work with leading figures like the revered trumpeter/composer Tom Harrell. Among his peers, Stephens has become a leader as much through the generosity of his spirit as his prodigious talent.
“I think I play better any time I’m playing with Dayna Stephens,” says Eigsti. “You hear him soloing and then you do something else that he inspired. He’s also one of the most genuine cats. He just doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone. Every little bit of his musicality is completely unique. He knows how to draw from the right places and yet do his own thing. It’s amazing to watch the way he works. The way he reharmonizes things is really similar to how I think about a lot of those things, which is trying not to rely on tricks or a formula, but just go on feeling. He really goes with his heart, in terms of what he hears.”
And just when Stephens seems to come into focus, he reveals another facet of his already improbably expansive musical gift. Last year he performed with fellow Berkeley High alum Peter Apfelbaum’s New York Hieroglyphics at the Monterey Jazz Festival, anchoring the large ensemble with his coruscating baritone saxophone work. He’s also backed trumpeter Roy Hargrove at Yoshi’s playing the acoustic bass. “Bari is probably my favorite of all the axes; it’s an unsung horn,” says Stephens. “I really love the bass, too. I took some lessons from Christian McBride and Bob Hurst, and I’m really honored to actually say a couple of things on it now.”
On the tenor, Stephens is speaking his piece with style and eloquence, and he’s rapidly finding an audience eager to hear what he has to say. You don’t have to be a jazz expert to recognize that Stephens is going to be an important voice for years to come, joining a Berkeley High honor roll that already includes more than a dozen world-class players.
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Andrew Gilbert is The Monthly’s music critic.
