No tricks, just pure vocal invention

Maybe there’s something in the water in San Francisco. Or maybe there’s something magical in the fog that creeps in off the bay.

Or maybe the reason for the surprising number of world-class jazz singers living within easy reach of the Golden Gate Bridge is simply the city’s fabled receptivity to artistic exploration. How else to explain the presence of such extraordinary vocal artists as Mark Murphy, Kitty Margolis, Wesla Whitfield, Anne Dyer, Paula West and Madeline Eastman? All talented, all unique, yet framed within a common quest for individual expressiveness, they have given San Francisco an important image as a vital incubator for the art of jazz singing.

Eastman, performing Thursday at the Vic in Santa Monica during one of her too-rare visits to the Southland, gave a thoroughly convincing seminar on the basics of jazz singing. Performing with a sterling trio (pianist Tom Garvin, bassist Chris Colangelo and drummer Steve Houghton), singing a set of familiar standards, she made the case for the importance of musicality over vocal trickery, for the fascination of inventiveness over superficiality.

Although she enhanced her set with witty repartee, Eastman was deadly serious with her singing, which often embarked on the sort of musical adventuring more commonly associated with instrumental jazz artists. She did so via improvising that eschewed scat singing in favor of fascinating melodic variations, deconstructing and reconstructing the elements of her songs in utterly new guises.

Eastman could swing hard, as she did in a stunning romp through “My Heart Stood Still,” and then turn around and find unexpected irony, as she did in “Show Me” from “My Fair Lady” and an odd, minor-key rendering of “Get Happy.” She was, in other words, a consummate, inventive, endlessly entertaining artist at work.