San Francisco jazz singer Paula West comes north to Rohnert Park

When Paula West sings Saturday night at Green Music Center’s Schroeder Hall, it will be her very first performance there, but she should feel right at home.

The intimate 240-seat hall, host to a variety of classical and pop music acts on the Sonoma State University campus, will be a comfortable fit for the jazz singer who made her name playing Bay Area cabarets, nightclubs and hotel lounges and beyond.

West’s music is most often tagged as “cabaret” or “jazz,” but she prides herself on a repertoire that stretches well beyond those categories.

“Actually, I get both labels. Some people think I’m a hybrid of cabaret and jazz,” she said. “For me, it depends on the venue as to the material that I’ll choose. When I first decided to sing, I was drawn to standards.”

The singer likes to tailor her list of songs to each venue, shortly before each show, so she couldn’t predict exactly what she’ll sing at her performance on the Sonoma State University campus, but she indicated the hall’s relatively intimate size would fit some of her cabaret favorites.

West, 57, grew up in San Diego and moved to San Francisco in 1988. By the early ’90s, she had graduated from jam sessions to club dates, and she eventually went on to tour nationally and internationally. At Schroeder Hall, backed by a piano, bass and drum trio, she will draw from a wide range of choices.

“I feel like the songbook has expanded now,” West said. “I feel like it would be too limited if I just kept to Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington and Irving Berlin. I started doing Bob Dylan songs several years ago. I’ll do Jimmy Webb, Glenn Campbell, Hank Williams. At my last show at Hotel Nikko, I did a David Bowie song.”

West takes care to make each song her own.

“I wouldn’t say I turn them inside out. You recognize the tune, but obviously I don’t sound like David Bowie, and we were working with a jazz quartet, but it went over like it was the highlight of the show,” she said.

That doesn’t mean the singer has abandoned her old favorites.

“The material I’m drawn to includes some of the works of Ethel Waters and Pearl Bailey that people don’t know so well. I don’t want to just do the standards you’ve heard a million times,” she said. “I want some interesting material.”

From the catalog of singer Pearl Bailey, whose career spanned from the 1930s to the ’80s, West favors the singer’s version of “I Wanna Get Married,” a tune recorded by a string of strong female vocalists in the early half of the 20th century.

“It’s highly unlikely that most people have heard those songs before, but they’re still really entertaining. Also, Pearl Bailey had a lot of humor in her material, and I always think that is important in a show,” West said.

West is a polished performer who believes in singing a lot more than she talks onstage, but she does give her audiences a little background on the songs and performers who made them popular. Over the years, she has adapted and expanded her club act to play well in larger halls.

“When I first started working in restaurants and bars and hotels, there were a lot more places,” West said. “I worked at pretty much all the hotels in the Nob Hill area and around Union Square. When I first moved here, every hotel lobby had a piano, with a minimum of a solo piano act, but most of them would have a duo or trio five and six nights a week. There’s not as many places to play now with this genre of music.”

West now concentrates on concert venues, but she still plays a four- to six-week stand each year at San Francisco’s Nikko Hotel in the late winter and early spring, and she performs at the SF Jazz festival in the summers. She aims to keep her goals high and her performances true to the material as she understands it.

“There a lot of jazz artists - instrumentalists and vocalists - and sometimes they’ll make connection with the audience, whereas in the cabaret field a lot of them maybe lack the musicality and the phrasing, and the element of swing,” she said. “I feel like the music is flexible. If an opera singer does a standard, as opposed to a jazz singer, it’s a totally different thing. I feel swing and the phrasing are really important.”

West believes choosing the right songs is every bit as important as performing them well.

“When you decide on a set, or you put together a show, there’s got to be different things going on - not too many ballads, some swing, and I like a show to have a Latin feel of some sort, and something really up-tempo, putting people through different moods.

“When I perform abroad, it can’t be a really lyric-driven song ‘cause they’re not gonna get some witty Cole Porter lyric if there’s a language barrier,” she said. “I customize each show. I just like people to have a good time.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.