Ron Carter Esperanza Spalding - Downbeat

Sara Gazarek
A Musician’s Singer
Sara Gazarek is a singer of disarming clarity.
Gifted with pinpoint pitch, an unwavering
sense of swing and a sly smile, she has succeeded
at winning over audiences everywhere
from the Cotton Club in Tokyo to Vitello’s in
Los Angeles, her adopted hometown.
But it is only in the past year that, by her
own account, Gazarek’s true voice has begun
to emerge. Having reached the age of 30, she
is focused anew on recording, releasing her
first album in five years. In the process, she has
begun to peel away the layers of artifice in her
musical persona.
“I’m really trying to bring myself, Sara, to
a song,” she said, “not just in terms of style but
in terms of the emotional context.”
To be sure, Gazarek’s style has never lacked
for validation. In 2000, as a high school student
in Seattle, she won the Ella Fitzgerald
Charitable Foundation Outstanding Jazz
Vocalist Award at the Essentially Ellington
Festival in New York. Three years later,
as a student at the University of Southern
California’s Thornton School of Music, she
won a DownBeat Student Music Award for
Best Jazz Vocal Soloist.
The Ellington competition took her to the
stage of Avery Fisher Fall at Lincoln Center,
where she shared time with Wynton Marsalis.
The DownBeat award led to a four-week tour
in 2004 for the Concord Jazz Festival, where
she joined luminaries Diane Schuur, Karrin
Allyson and Oleta Adams in a vocal quartet.
That engagement led to her debut album in
2005, Yours (Native Language), which landed
on the jazz charts amid considerable acclaim.
The praise, however, was not universal.
While Gazarek’s technical capabilities were
never challenged, at least one critic questioned
whether a 23-year-old could have the life experience
needed to tackle the sophisticated material
that was on the album. For an admittedly
naive performer with a “fear of not being taken
seriously,” Gazarek said, the criticism was difficult
to shake. She released albums in each of
the next two years and then abruptly stopped.
Now Gazarek has come roaring back. She
is more at ease on the bandstand; so, too, in
the studio. Her latest album, Blossom & Bee
(Palmetto), is a playful affair, offering witty
treatments of standards by Rodgers and Hart
and Arlen and Harburg and a jaunty account of
George R. Newall’s “Unpack Your Adjectives,”
an artifact from the educational animated
music video series Schoolhouse Rock. She
has even appeared in satirical sketches on
YouTube—a sideline, she insists, not intended
Andrew Southam
as marketing support for the album.
Gazarek’s determination to reveal her
comedic side owes in part to the influence of
her producer, keyboardist Larry Goldings,
who oversaw humor-filled recording sessions
for Blossom & Bee in a farmhouse studio in
Pennsylvania. For the recording, Goldings
became her writing partner, contributing the
music for the title tune, a hard-swinging ode to
love between opposites, for which Gazarek and
Bill DeMain penned the words. Goldings also
recruited an old friend, John Pizzarelli, whose
presence on guitar and vocals lent an added
kick to what was by all accounts already a spirited
effort reflecting Gazarek’s blend of technique
and emotional intelligence.
“She is a musician’s singer,” Goldings said.
“She can emote in a lot of different ways.”
Gazarek’s ability to emote extends beyond
the stage and studio to the classroom. At USC,
she teaches a popular vocal jazz ensemble
that features arrangements of contemporary
tunes that explore a range of mature themes.
Recalling her experience with the critic who
thought that material on her first album was
off-limits for young singers, Gazarek tells her
students that they can sing anything they like—
as long as they come to it honestly.
That, she acknowledged, is no mean feat.
For all her gifts, she has labored to achieve
greater authenticity in her own performance,
a process that continues. Still, having made
progress on that front—and documenting the
accomplishment with the new album—she and
her trio are planning to spread the word in tours
throughout the East and Midwest. They have
already won the West.
“We feel confident and comfortable in the
place we’ve made for ourselves,” she said. “We
want to wholeheartedly share who we are as
people with the listeners.” —Phillip Lutz