Sari Schorr: “Live in Europe” and Loving in Brooklyn

Sari Schorr / photo by Rob Blackham /courtesy of Manhaton Records

Growing up in Queens, Sari Schorr was “exposed to jazz and soul from the time I was born,” she tells Brooklyn Roads. Her parents’ love of such icons as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles “definitely forged an identity within me.” Her appreciation of music broadened and evolved when she began singing and playing the piano. “I turned my attention to rhythm and blues, blues rock, progressive rock, pop and funk,” she says.

Schorr’s energetic brand of blues-rock is guitar-driven “with sharp melodic hooks that support my nuanced style of lyric writing,” she tells us. “I like to tackle subjects that are difficult to talk about, like drug addiction and domestic violence … [creating] strong visual images that l hope

Sari Schorr On Stage/ photo by Robert Sutton / courtesy of Manhaton Records

connect with the listener.”

She says her new album, Live in Europe, is one “I’ve wanted to make for a long time. I’m so grateful to front a phenomenal band. We’ve racked up … so many hours on stage that I was highly motivated to capture the band’s energy, power, and excitement on tour.” The performances are more “honest” on a live album, she says, and they represent “precisely where we were at that moment in time and how we were expressing ourselves.”

Schorr, who says she loves many of the places she’s toured throughout the world, tells us that Brooklyn, her home for 25 years, “still has the hold on me,” adding that, “People around the globe see Brooklyn as the epitome of cool. There’s an energy that surges through the borough, sparked by the diversity of its 2.6 million residents. As the granddaughter of Russian immigrants, I’m proud to be a part of that shining example of multiculturalism. It inspires me.”

Sari Schorr Up Against A Wall / photo by Jean-Philippe Hugeuet / courtesy of Manhaton Records

She tells Brooklyn Roads that the “great diversity of music percolating throughout Brooklyn” has figured prominently in her music. “I’d go to the rock clubs in Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint and hear bands like Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, They Might Be Giants, Grizzly Bear and LCD Soundsystem,” she says. In Park Slope, Schorr lived near the late, lamented Southpaw, “where bands like Deer Tick, Joan Jet and TV On The Radio played.” During a one-year residency there, she produced a monthly unplugged show, hosting more than 50 artists, “including Josh Ritter, Liberty DeVitto, Popa Chubby and Danny Kalb,” she says.

Schorr feels privileged going to such small community venues as Jalopy in Red Hook, “to hear traditional and folk music,” and Barbès in Park Slope, “to catch an astonishing variety of eclectic [international] music,” noting that, “Everything we listen to becomes a part of our musical  vocabulary.” She adds that our borough’s rich musical history “also shaped who I am. Patti Smith was based in Brooklyn in the 1970s. [In] the 1940s, one of my favorite singers, Billie Holiday, got her start at the Brooklyn Elk’s Club.”

Schorr’s love of Brooklyn is quite apparent in her recently released video love letter to New York City, “Ordinary Life.” The song is from her aptly titled debut album, A Force of Nature.