Pain might not be pretty, but honesty is riveting.

Thirsty Ghost is an unabashed exploration of loss, heartache and, ultimately, healing. It represents a departure for vocalist Sara Gazarek, whose career began its ascent when she was a teenager singing with Wynton Marsalis at Avery Fisher Hall. It’s also the most exciting recording of her career.

About two decades after those dates with Marsalis, a series of personal challenges—divorce, a family health crisis, an intimate betrayal—caused Gazarek to re-examine not only her always-perky repertoire, but the way that she relates to her audience. DownBeat was on hand Aug. 10 when Gazarek debuted the album at New York’s Jazz Standard, and in an interview following the performance, she talked about the trauma that led her to chart a new artistic course.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Downbeat: On this record you throw off your usually sunny musical persona and delve into the darker side of relationship. Why is this release different from your earlier albums?  

Sara Gazarek: With Thirsty Ghost I didn’t start with the goal of picking songs for an album, like I did for Yours [Gazarek’s debut, 2005] or Blossom and Bee [sophomore release, 2007]. Instead, over a four-year period I specifically chose songs to help me process things that were happening in my life. At the end of that four-year period there was a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

DB: This also your first self-produced album. Why now, after six albums as a leader?

SG: I was thinking about what it means to have a producer. The role of a producer is to polish an album with their own brand of soap—to help pick the songs and the concept, see the project through to the end. But this album wasn’t a concept, it was my life, and I wondered if having a producer would prohibit my ability to actually express what it is I wanted to say. Because this record is the most personal that I’ve ever released, I wanted to be the only one in charge of the artistic decisions.

DB: In your Jazz Standard concert, you talked about how singer Kurt Elling has supported you throughout your career and was in fact the catalyst for the new focus in your work. How so?

SG: Kurt pointed out to me that in my art I was hiding from the things that I was going through personally. I was continuing to play into the idea that I was the ingénue in the dress, the girl who wanted to sing light love songs, smiling and making jokes, and introducing the band a hundred times. Hiding behind these things made me feel safe.

DB: Did you have any concerns about your fans’ expectations?

SG: I wondered how it was going to be received. Either [the audience] would be on board or not, but at that point for me it was not an option. I couldn’t survive musically with the same agenda. My center—who I was as a person—had shifted so greatly, it had gotten to the point where it almost felt bad to be on stage singing about things that I wasn’t actually experiencing.

DB: The material on the album cuts a wide swath both musically and emotionally. How did you pull all of these contrasting tunes together into a cohesive whole?

SG: Every song on the album is different because each one came out of a different situation. They’re all birthed from the same place of wanting to heal something that I had experienced, but each followed a different process. And that process was rooted in trusting myself and trusting my colleagues.

DB: You can really hear the grit on your version of Dolly Parton’s classic, “Jolene.”

SG: For this arrangement I told [Geoffrey Keezer, arranger] that I wanted to burn the house down and slash tires. I wanted something more muscular, at a slower tempo, and with a more constant subdivision so that it felt more driving. He came back with that arrangement and it was perfect.

DB: Your rendition of Björk’s “Cocoon” is just as emotional, but loving. It’s the flip side of “Jolene.”   

SG: That song was terrifying to record because it has a tempo, but it’s rubato, and I was conducting the song’s movement based on the interpretation of the lyrics. There was no room for punching, no auto-tune, no fixing any line. It sounds so raw. And as a singer who is rooted in perfection and clarity, for me that was an exercise in release.

DB: You contributed lyrics to three of the tracks, most notably for Brad Mehldau’s instrumental “When It Rains,” which you titled “Distant Storm.” And the title of the album comes from one of these lyrics. What about the Mehldau tune inspired you?

SG: The shifts that the song takes are so compelling. The imagery that I had for this one was a barren landscape that opens up. I’ve had tried to write lyrics for it four or five times over the last 10 years, and nothing came. Then, when we were going to the studio to make the album, I noticed that all of the songs on it were about cheating. But this is not a breakup record—it’s an album about a journey. Ultimately, the story is summarized in “Distant Storm.”

DB: How would you sum up its message?

SG: That the warmth of sunlight comes and goes, but beauty only grows when it rains. That if you really want a whole-hearted experience in life, you have to embrace all of it. That’s the lesson I took from that four-year period, and that’s where I am now, feeling comfortable sitting in the uncomfortable stuff, not running from it. With the understanding that by doing this, I will feel the brilliance of life more deeply.

DB: It seems, then, that the story ends on a positive note.

SG: Yes—I am in that space where I feel the brilliance of life. Even so, there’s still the depth and the darkness there. I don’t think that I’ll ever again be the artist who is content just singing happy-go-lucky songs. I’m going to continue to dig and grow, and my art will reflect that. DB

(Originally published in Downbeat Online, 23 August 2019)