Sarah Sharp Quintet

Sarah Sharp is performing her jazz debut, Déjà Vu, at the Elephant Room on Thursday, October 8, at 6 PM. It's part of her long-running Thursday night residency there, which has been going for almost nine years now. She's playing with her quintet: Sarah Sharp, John Fremgen, Masumi Jones, Oliver Steck, and Mitch Watkins.

Sharp is an Austin-based jazz singer and songwriter whose sound weaves together jazz, vintage pop, and folk. She studied at Berklee College of Music and moved to London at 21, where she started playing jazz gigs before returning to Austin to front a weekly residency at the Ritz, which is now the Comedy Mothership. For seven and a half years, she played with Slim Richey—more than 200 shows a year steeped in the viper jazz of the 1930s and 40s—until he passed away in 2015. Since then, she's been playing with Mitch Watkins, a partnership that's coming up on 11 years, and drummer Masumi Jones, who's been with her for 17 and a half.

That history shows up in the music. Her Thursday night at the Elephant Room is a residency built on improvisation and the band's lived experience. NPR's All Songs Considered describes her soft-spoken singing and quiet instrumentation as offering a living-room, fireside closeness that keeps her away from the lounge-singer stereotypes of similarly jazz-influenced performers.

Déjà Vu is her jazz debut, and you can catch it on Thursday, October 8, at 6 PM at the Elephant Room. She'll be back again on October 22, and she plays every Thursday night.