Sequoia Snyder plays jazz across the country, but she’s excited to be home

After seven years studying and performing music in Detroit, New York City and beyond, Sequoia Snyder considers it a blessing to be back in her Bowie home.

She runs through keyboard exercises in solitude in the corner of her bedroom. And she sits at the same piano she’s been playing since high school in her family’s recreation room while corralling her young niece from running around.

“I can’t quite put it into words,” Snyder, 27, told The Banner on the porch of her family’s home. “Just to be able to be there for my family and spend time with them … because they’re probably the closest people to me in my life. So, I mean, it’s done wonders for my mental health.”

It’s been the start the up-and-coming artist wanted when she moved home with her parents in her effort this past year to plant her musical flag where it all began.

She was born in D.C., and the family moved to Florida for a good chunk of her childhood before moving back to Prince George’s County when she was 10. Snyder got into D.C.’s prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where her sister also attended and her mother worked as an English teacher, to study vocal performance. But a year later she got hooked on playing piano and switched her focus.

“I’m already laughing because I wish, if one of my parents were here, they’d tell you I was always a pretty intense child,” Snyder said. “I was always trying to work hard to a goal too young.”

Snyder recalls her less-polished first encounter with the piano when she was just mashing keys while her mother and her side of the family rehearsed for services at First Baptist Church of Glenarden. She said her time in that church community tuned her musical ear and continues to shape her jazz compositions.

“The things that playing in church does for your intuition as a musician and does for your ear is unquantifiable,” Snyder said.

“Learning how to adapt and sense the energy in the room and be quick on your feet to pick up keys and pick up songs and pick up moods and flows that happen within a church service. That’s obviously the greatest skill to me that you can have as a musician.”

She attended Michigan State University and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in jazz studies. The work ethic and culture around East Lansing, Michigan, were formative in how she wants to pursue music as a career, Snyder said. She ingratiated herself in the Detroit jazz scene and regularly returns to perform concerts there.

The flash of inspiration for her latest work, “Solus,” came in 2022 when Snyder, who also performs as “Redwood,” was waiting to board an airplane. In the airport terminal, she composed her part — a stirring melody that jogs and sprints as if moving to catch a flight you’re late for.

She got bassist Brandon Rose and drummer Caleb Robinson in the studio (Silver Spring’s Blue House Productions) a handful of times to ping-pong steadying grooves before she finally landed on a mix she was happy with. The single came out Aug. 21 and is a precursor to a larger project, “Inner Knowing,” that she’s planning to self-release Sept. 1 through her Bandcamp — it will be available to stream Sept. 25, she says.

Her work blends traditional jazz stylings with hip-hop and gospel. Snyder has long-held obsessions with the works of pianists Stevie Wonder and Robert Glasper and has been branching out her listening to rock music and peers who are evolving jazz, such as Alfa Mist, a British musician.

Snyder credits her homecoming and faith journey with the clarity she has found to finish these recent works. She said she has befriended musicians and collaborators at Faith Focused Ministries in La Plata.

But she’s most eager to establish herself further in the capital region’s live music scene and tap back into her vocal training. She has performed at venues such as the Kennedy Center with jazz luminaries including Jason Moran and Herbie Hancock, but she wants to keep pushing her music out to as wide an audience as possible in the region. Her next performance in the area will be Sept. 5 as part of a showcase of Next Jazz Legacy, an apprenticeship program that Snyder is part of this year, during the D.C. Jazz Fest.

“What I want my music to do is connect people to themselves for a moment,” Snyder said. “For that period of time, you’re kind of in this other world. So I want to create a world that allows people to be in touch with their emotions.”

“Just to be more in touch and connected with themselves because I feel like that’s a hard thing to do for us.”

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