Sami Stevens grew up in East Winthrop, Maine, and studied privately with Dominique Eade and John McNeil at the New England Conservatory of Music, graduating with a BM in Vocal Jazz Performance in the fall of 2014; she also holds a BA in Psychology from Tufts University. It was at NEC, in 2011, that she first crossed paths with tenor saxophonist Kazemde George — the two were both dual-degree students, and they met playing in a neo-soul ensemble together. The friendship became a romance three years later via a gospel-ensemble rehearsal, and the couple married; their wedding was featured in the New York Times "Mini-vows" column in August 2021. George, who holds a master's in jazz composition from NEC and a neurobiology degree from Harvard, has become one of Stevens's most frequent musical partners: she sings and co-wrote lyrics for two tracks — "Skylight" and "Happy Birthday" — on his 2021 debut leader album I Insist (Greenleaf Music, the label run by trumpeter Dave Douglas), recorded in December 2019 and later given a Japanese CD edition on BSMF Records.

Long before her own name was on an album cover, Stevens built a career as a first-call vocalist inside New York's downtown soundtrack-and-exotica scene. She is the longtime lead voice of Tredici Bacci, composer Simon Hanes's "faux-Italian" 1970s-soundtrack ensemble — described by Rolling Stone as delivering "sexy, mysterious, mod-à-go-go romps" and by one profile as the group's "not-so-secret weapon" — appearing on its records going back to The Thirteen Kisses EP (2015) through Amore Per Tutti (2016), La Fine Del Futuro (2019), and 2024's Brave New World, the latter also featuring contributions from avant-garde composer JG Thirlwell (Foetus). In parallel, she has sung for years with Morricone Youth, the ensemble built around live film re-scoring, appearing on releases including Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (2017), Danger: Diabolik (2018), The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (2021), Battleship Potemkin (Original Re-Score) (2023), and Eight Eyes (2024). That same downtown circle brought her into JG Thirlwell's own orbit directly: she sings on Oscillospira (2020), his collaborative album with Simon Steensland on Ipecac Recordings, and on Foetus's Halt (2025). Her vocal and, on occasion, engineering credits extend further still — Nubdug Ensemble's Third (2024), Amanda Chaudhary/Meow Meow Band's January Suborbital Denomination (2024), saxophonist Ludovica Burtone's Sparks (2023), guitarist Rotem Sivan's Dream Louder (2024), Grant Richards's Menagerie (2024, where she also co-wrote a lyric), and singer-songwriter Robin Buyer's Tracing a Line (2021) all carry her name in the credits, a body of session work considerably larger than her thin public profile as a leader would suggest.

In 2023, Stevens released her debut solo album, Morning, on Sunnyside Records — an 11-song, 43-minute record built with co-producer/arranger Simon Hanes and producer/mixer Ryan Power, and featuring a rotating cast of Brooklyn players across two recording sessions: pianist Noah MacNeil, electric bassist Jed Linghat, drummer Bob Edinger, harpist Marilu Donovan, vibraphonist Aaron Edgcomb, French hornist Kevin Newton, and separate string and brass sections (cellists Ansel Cohen and Saul Richmond-Rakerd, violists Alexandra Simpson and Jay Julio, violinists Abby Swidler, Kashi Elliott, Ruby Z. Wang, and Solanch Sosa, trombonists Andy Strain and Lucy Hollier, and trumpeters Chris Grady and Tree Palmedo), mastered by Myles Boisen. Glide Magazine wrote that with it she "quickly established herself as one of the most promising songwriters to appear in the past few years," and the album — showcasing her rich vocal delivery across intimate personal stories and symphonic textures — was also praised by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, DownBeat, and the New York Times, and featured on official Spotify playlists including "Best Vocal Jazz of 2021."

Stevens's live career has crossed genre boundaries just as freely as her session work, taking her onto stages with drummer Brian Blade, vocalist Emily King, guitarist John Scofield, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, Gary Wilson, Curren$y, and pianist Jason Moran, and opening for Rachael Price, John Zorn, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, and Talib Kweli. She is currently developing a new one-woman theatrical piece written by Zorn and lyricist Jesse Harris. She has toured five continents, appearing at the Barclays Center, the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Nippon Budokan, the Apollo Theatre, Red Rocks, the Kennedy Center, Paramount Brooklyn, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Lincoln Center, Cotton Club Tokyo, and National Sawdust. From 2024 into 2026, she spent two years on the road as a backing vocalist and auxiliary keyboardist/guitarist in Norah Jones's touring band supporting Jones's album Visions — alongside singer Sasha Dobson, the first time Jones's live show carried two dedicated backing vocalists. Stevens has since relocated from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, and serves on the faculty of Stanford Jazz.

Stevens's genre-crossing blend of jazz, soul, and folk influences, delivered through her own compositions and piano/Wurlitzer accompaniment, made her a distinctive singer-songwriter voice within the broader vocal jazz tradition. But her sound was shaped as much by years inside other people's music as by her own writing: the cinematic, faux-vintage theatricality of Tredici Bacci and Morricone Youth trained a voice equally comfortable playing a character inside a film score as delivering a confessional lyric, while stints alongside avant-garde figures like JG Thirlwell pushed her range toward the stranger, more textural end of vocal performance. Morning channels that same instinct for orchestral scale — strings, brass, harp, and vibraphone built around an intimate singer-songwriter core — into her own material, and her standing collaborations with figures ranging from John Scofield to Jason Moran to her husband, saxophonist Kazemde George, gave her a genuine footing within the working jazz community even before she had a leader album of her own.