Jazz Residency Participant Profile: Sakae Goto
One Jazz Residency participant who has become a familiar face to many at the Workshop is Sakae Goto, who has attended the Jazz Residency Vocal Program four out of the last five years. Her dedication and enthusiasm are outstanding, so we thought we'd ask her to tell us a little bit about herself and how she came to SJW:

The end of 2003, I received an e-mail from my husband’s best friend, an enthusiastic jazz lover living in Palo Alto CA.  It was information about Stanford Jazz Workshop. At the time, I was a jazz student at Yokohama Jam Music Institute in Japan, so this was exciting news to me.  I was eager to join the program, so I sent my application to the office and submitted my audition tape. It was the very beginning of my SJW experience.

I’ve been studying jazz vocals for about twelve years.  Long time before that, when I was a college student, one of my classmates took me to the jazz coffeehouse in the neighborhood of the Sophia University in Tokyo.  She was practicing jazz piano, and we often went to the record shop and browsed the LP records of jazz virtuosos such as Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis, but seldom listened to vocalists. I never imagined that I’d be singing jazz in the future.

One-and-a half years after enjoying jazz singing at a community club, I entered Yokohama Jam Music Institute, a well-known jazz school in Japan that teaches jazz vocals. I’ve been studying here for more than ten years.  After eight years of vocal instruction, I started rhythm and percussion lessons and am now studying jazz theory again with a professional drummer as well as a sax player.  Some of my favorite classes include Jazz chorus and bass or guitar duos. Outside of school, I often practice to sing with professional bands and have solo gigs once or twice a year.

SJW has opened my eyes to the jazz world.  Until I attended the Workshop, I had been practicing how to sing like Ella Fitzgerald or Sara Vaughan and copied their singing style.  But at SJW, vocal faculty Madeline Eastman and Dena DeRose asked me to sing in my own style.  Their advice is to sing what you want to express. I’ve learned how to improvise the melodies. The scat lesson is also very new to me.  In Japan, instrument players generally do not like vocalists to scat often if at all; one reason may be that Japanese singers seldom scat very well and are not so cool I dare say.

I was so excited to study with the jazz natives at SJW during my first year in 2004 that I could not sleep or rest well during the whole week.  Learning jazz is my life’s work and my experience at SJW has been conducive to my development as a jazz singer. I intend to come to this workshop for as long as possible.

Pictured: Sakae Goto at the 2008 Jazz Residency, with pianist Randy Porter in the background. Photo credit, Scott Chernis.