Dayna Stephens

For nearly 15 years, having achieved international renown as a saxophonist (#1 Rising Star Tenor, 2019 Downbeat Critics Poll), Dayna Stephens has worked assiduously to create a musical voice on the Akai Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI). Following in the footsteps of Bob Mintzer and the late Michael Brecker, and like his EWI-exploring peers Morgan Guerin, Mark Shim and Seamus Blake, Stephens has featured the EWI in select contexts with his own bands, on Gilad Hekselman’s 2019 release Further Chaos and other projects. With Pluto Juice, co-led and co-produced by drummer and composer Anthony Fung, Stephens turns the spotlight fully on EWI for the first time, in an adventurous electric quartet setting with the stellar Canadian musicians Andrew Marzotto (guitar) and Rich Brown (bass).

One of the band’s first pieces, “Approaching Pluto,” was composed by Stephens when NASA’s New Horizons craft completed its long-awaited flyby of the dwarf planet in the summer of 2015. The music that followed was conceived specifically for the group, and the theme of space travel stuck. Stephens’ “Welcome to Our Snow Globe” leads off with a focus on Earth, while “Outskirts of Neptune” strives to capture the journey through the outermost solar system as Pluto grows momentously near. Fung’s “Pluto and Beyond” follows New Horizons past its final destination and further into the void, while two more Fung compositions, “Trial on Mars” and “Green Gargantua,” deal respectively with imagined conflict on other worlds and the unfathomably massive emptiness of a black hole. The writing, full of complexity, rhythmic urgency and sonic adventure, represents a thrilling new departure for the two co-leaders.

Fung, a Toronto native now based in Los Angeles, has two fine albums to his credit, Chronicles (2014) and Flashpoint (2018, awarded four stars in Downbeat). He first played with Stephens when called to sub on a trio gig at the LA club Sam First. Sparks flew right away, and Fung invited Stephens up to Toronto to pursue the EWI-driven collaboration that became Pluto Juice. “The first Pluto Juice gig in January 2019 was immediately awesome,” recalls Stephens, “and by the time we played the Toronto Jazz Festival we knew we had to record, because this was some serious s**t.”

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