Sara Gazarek’s upcoming show in Seattle, WA at The Triple Door on August 26 has been featured as part of “The Best Jazz Concerts in Seattle This Summer” in The Stranger.

“Sara Gazarek is a jazz singer who has roots in Seattle. She got her proper start in jazz at Roosevelt High School, expanded her knowledge of the art form at Thornton School of Music, released her debut, Yours, in 2005, and has won many awards. What makes her interesting to me is that she has a style, a manner of singing, that has an eroticism that’s not exotic at all but instead draws from what many would consider to be an unexciting region of American life—the white middle class. Gazarek can swing, for sure, and there is a lot of soul and technical sophistication in her work, but it also has a flame, a passion, that’s wonderfully, even beautifully plain (by US standards). This is not an easy thing to express. I do not want you to get me wrong. I’m a fan of her approach. Maybe one should just hear her albums, and in particular Return to You, to get a sense of my meaning. But know that a weaker artist would never turn to middle-class-white mode for this kind of lusty inspiration, turn to the comfortable home, the two-car garage, the dinners at restaurants with favorable Yelp reviews, and so on to excite the Eros of a listening audience. A weaker artist would appropriate the easily recognizable and coded passions of the South, of the sunny climes. Gazarek is not breathy or even bluesy. She hides and makes up nothing. She sings as exactly who she is—a sensual white American.”CM