Jazz players come together to remember Synia Carroll

The crème de la crème of bay area jazz musicians will come together on a single stage Thursday to celebrate one of their own.

The concert, at the Side Door Cabaret inside the Palladium Theater, is a musical celebration of life for vocalist Synia Carroll, who lost her battle with cancer in March.

The bands Bryan J. Hughes & The Crew and La Lucha will perform, and the night will be peppered with guest players, all of whom shared the stage with Carroll at one time or another.

The list includes John Lamb (bass), Belinda Womack and Theo Valentin (vocals), Jeremy Carter (saxophone), James Suggs (trumpet) and Simon Lasky (piano).

A former Philadelphia schoolteacher who moved to Sarasota in 2014, Carroll was a latecomer to jazz singing – once she caught on, she told the Catalyst in 2021, she was in it for keeps. “My voice just started to emerge,” she said, “in ways I never really knew were there.”

Carroll had worked, in her off-hours, as a worldbeat vocalist – and professional school and festival storyteller. And that’s how she approached jazz singing. “When I started singing jazz, I understood what it was to tell a story with a song,” she said.

“The music has communication between you and the players – that’s really important – as well as you and the audience. And there’s a story behind every song; you want to tell the story.

“And it has this freedom. Like, you don’t have to sound pretty all the time. You just have to be real. You have to be authentic. Sometimes that means sounding pretty, and sometimes that means sounding whatever. It may not even be a sound. And all the notes that are silent! In other words, the space between the notes counts. It all counts.”

Alejandro Arenas, bassist for both La Lucha and The Crew, spoke this week about working with Carroll.

“Synia was awesome,” he reflected. “The first thing was her energy – even though she came to music, professionally, later in life – she was very, very open to creating something new. She didn’t want to be your run-of-the-mill singer.”

Carroll, who was known for her Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan tribute concerts, brought a similarly soulful edge to her re-workings of jazz standards.

“She had a lot of influences and channeled some of those, but she had her own voice from the very beginning, and a great energy that she approached everything with,” Arenas said. “It was always honest – which is what you want.

“The great thing about Synia was that she was always committed to the song, to the emotion of the moment, and it was always a journey. A good journey. She always wanted to arrange songs in a way that connected her to it.”

The human voice is a particularly supple musical instrument, which is why instrumentalists often taking backing-band gigs.

“It’s a more palpable way of connecting with a song, through the lyrics,” Arenas explained. “Because it’s very specific, as opposed to somebody that’s paying a melody, and expressing themselves through that. I really enjoy working with singers because of that. They each have their own interpretation of a set of lyrics. I get inspired by that.

“As a bass player, you’re kind of setting the root for them – but you also respond to them. The bass is felt in a less obvious way than a sax, or an instrument that’s more clearly playing a melody. It’s a more understated way of interacting with that melody. You get to do things that are felt a little bit differently.”

The audience, he adds, “may not notice them as much, in an obvious way, but they may feel them more.”

Palladium executive director Paul Wilborn published a moving tribute on his blog Wednesday. “Synia was a rare talent,” he wrote. “She was a soaring and sensitive vocalist. She chose great material, put together top-notch backing bands and her shows always did great business. Audiences loved her whether she was channeling Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan or doing her own music. 

“I loved her for all of that, but it was her personality, her warmth, and her drive to explore new musical avenues that truly drew me to her.”

Tickets for Thursday’s Side Door Cabaret event are available at this link.