Spend Saturday night with San Francisco jazz musician Madeline Eastman

The San Francisco Bay Area jazz revival of the 1990s popularized a number of great instrumentalists, including guitarist Charlie Hunter, pianist Benny Green and saxophonist Joshua Redman.

But the SF renaissance also produced some world-class singers. One of the very best, Madeline Eastman, makes a rare Seattle appearance at Bake's Place Saturday as part of the club's "Visiting Songbirds" series.

If you want to hear a vocalist with chops and authority a cut above even her excellent Seattle peers, make a point of hearing Eastman. She performs at 8 p.m. ($22; or $49.50 with 7 p.m. dinner; 425-491-3335 or www.bakesplace.org) with her regular pianist, Portlander Randy Porter, plus Seattleites Chuck Deardorf, bass, and John Bishop, drums.

Eastman projects a full, forward alto that radiates confidence, a full emotional range and absolute control of dynamics, tension and phrasing. Though drawn to the fancifully hip deconstructions of Betty Carter, Mark Murphy and former-Seattleite Jay Clayton, Eastman never abandons words for the music.

"The lyrics have to make sense," she said in a phone conversation last week from her home in San Francisco. "I never want to have an audience not understand what I'm saying."

This doesn't mean Eastman in any way presents songs in a "standard" manner. She plays with tempos, harmonies, time signatures and forms but always probes the essence of a song.

"I love the Great American Songbook," she said. "But I want to take a ride with it, have another layer of the harmonic thing, more rhythm stuff to play with."

On Eastman's most-recent album, "The Speed of Life" (Mad-Kat), she deftly lifts the tempo of the Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart standard, "There's a Small Hotel," with polyrhythmic drums, then delivers a swinging scat interlude over the muted trumpet of Mike Olmos.

Her oblique, confidential recasting of "We Kiss in a Shadow" (also by Rodgers, with Hammerstein), is smart but never self-consciously brainy.

"Speed of Life" is Eastman's fifth album on Mad-Kat, the label she and the equally talented SF singer Kitty Margolis started in 1988, inspired by Carter's Bet-Car Records. Eastman celebrates the release of her first live album in May at the new San Francisco branch of the Oakland venue Yoshi's.

Eastman grew up on the San Francisco peninsula and discovered jazz singing at the College of San Mateo — and, she adds with a hint of embarrassment — after seeing that terrible film about Billie Holiday, "Lady Sings the Blues."

Moving to San Francisco, she immediately found top musicians — or they found her — who have consistently contributed to her five albums, players such as trumpeter Tom Harrell, saxophonist Phil Woods, drummer Tony Williams and pianist Cedar Walton.

Eastman is a clinician at this year's Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival, in Idaho, and is in high demand as a teacher. She directs Jazz Camp West, in La Honda, Calif., serves as faculty at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, the Berkeley Jazz School and as a traveling clinician for the Monterey Jazz Festival.

"It took me a while to get the skills to be a good teacher," she admitted, "but the key is to not tell somebody something, but give them a way to it."

She also does an intensive weekend retreat called VoiceShop.

"That's my ideal setting," she said, "Six students for a weekend. They spend the night. I cook, and we listen to music and we sing."

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com