The first time Steve Smith wanted to present his new batch of songs, things didn’t quite work out as planned. Along with singer-pianist Jillian Lebeck and drummer Paul Townsend, he’d planned on premiering them at St. Andrew’s–Wesley United Church almost exactly a year ago. But once the musicians got to the venue, they decided circumstances weren’t quite right.

“Because the sound was so weird in there—or perhaps I should say super reverb-y—Jillian decided she didn’t want to sing,” Smith recalls, on the line from his Vancouver home. “So we played all the same music but without vocals.”

That might seem strange, but it isn’t, really—at least not when you consider the history of the songs in question, which represent both an artistic departure for the bassist and a return to his earliest days as a bandleader.

As the California-born musician tells it, he’d never really thought about writing lyrics: not when he was just starting out as an electric bassist in rock bands; not when he was learning jazz and the upright bass; and not when he arrived in Vancouver in the company of his Canadian wife, pianist and composer Lisa Cay Miller. But he’d always written music, and many of the melodies that his Steve Smith’s SONGS project will present as part of the TD Canada Trust Vancouver International Jazz Festival date back to his 1999 debut, Chantal’s Way, on which he’s joined by pianist Richie Beirach and drummer Billy Hart.

When he first heard Lebeck, however, Smith was immediately convinced that her voice was perfectly suited to his tunes and set to work writing words to suit.

“And wow, is it ever hard,” he says, laughing. “It’s really hard. I find it really difficult to write something that isn’t all corny or cheesy, you know. I’m trying to make it poetic. And the other thing that made it really challenging was that I was working from existing melodies—but other than changing a chord or adding a couple of notes to fit the lyrics, I pretty much was true to those original tunes.”

It helps, Smith adds, that he usually has a specific image in mind when he’s composing, and his new lyrics reflect those old themes. Some of his songs meditate on his late grandmother, on sailing with his father-in-law, and on the philosophical musings of hippie guru Baba Ram Dass, while at least two have to do with beautiful and treacherous landscapes.

“ ‘Blue Cave’ is about an underwater cave on the island of Kauai,” he explains. “I was travelling around that area and I heard of this underwater cave where something to do with the phosphorescence creates this kind of fluorescent blue colour. But the danger is that at high tide, if you’re in the cave you’ll drown. I thought that was kind of interesting, the juxtaposition of extreme natural beauty and death. And ‘Kilauea’ is named after a volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii—not your stereotypical mountain with a cone on top, but a long, horizontal mountain that was spewing out hot lava that would then drop into the Pacific Ocean and steam up.”

Such topics are a significant departure for Lebeck, whose own solo efforts Living in Pieces and Songs & Melodies have focused more on her own compositions, interspersed with the occasional standard or jazzed-up pop song.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever participated in a project like this, where I’ve had to learn somebody else’s originals and sing them,” she says, reached on her cellphone while driving home from her “day job”—playing background music for the lounge crowd at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver hotel. “I’ve always been a fan of Steve’s writing, so I’m excited about this, and flattered that he asked me. The tunes are a bit of a challenge for me to sing, because the melodies are very intricate, and he uses a lot of interesting harmonies and intervals and things like that. So I’ve been trying to draw upon some other influences to be able to perform the music and sing it.”

Lebeck cites Norma Winstone as one of her role models, and the British singer’s poetic style would indeed be appropriate for Smith’s open-ended approach. Rather than write long, storytelling songs, he’s crafted brief lyrics that are intended, he says, to point the listener in the direction of his original inspiration.

“The compositions stand on their own,” he stresses. “They have strong melodies and harmonies, and I’ll still perform these songs without vocals, but the lyrics give the listener a window into what the music was about.”

Steve Smith’s SONGS plays the Roundhouse Community Centre on Sunday (July 5) as part of the free Jazz at the Roundhouse series.