Rhonda Sauce keeps taking people by surprise, but at the rate she’s gaining fans her fitting name should soon be widely recognized.
The Oakland-based vocalist, arranger and songwriter’s fiercest champions are her fellow musicians, like organist Sundra Manning, a prolific accompanist and composer who played an essential role in R&B vocalist Ledisi’s rise to fame.
In a story echoed by several other musicians, Manning met Sauce playing piano on what’s called a casual, an unbilled private party or event. “She started singing and blew me away,” said Manning, who recalled thinking, “Who is this person and where did she come from?”
They’ve been calling each other for gigs ever since, like Manning’s concert featuring Sauce at the Jazzschool in Berkeley on Saturday. It’s a program devoted to the music of the commanding but little-known jazz vocalist Irene Reid (1930-2008), who toured and recorded briefly with the Count Basie Orchestra in the early 1960s.
Manning and Sauce have bonded over their passion for obscure material mostly uncovered by other singers. “I love her energy,” Manning said. “She’s so creative with her vocals, bending notes and words. Her repertoire is so wide. I’m like, how do you find these songs I’ve never heard of?”
Growing up between Oakland and San Leandro, Sauce studied violin for much of her childhood and taught herself guitar at 10, “writing songs, and producing little shows,” she said. Sauce has always performed under her childhood nickname, a moniker that also helped her claim her own identity. With her mixed heritage — her mother is a Filipina immigrant and her father, who she didn’t grow up with, was African American — she often felt betwixt and between cultures.
Music was a centering force in her life, particularly tunes from the American Songbook. She and her mom frequented the Alley Piano Bar & Restaurant in Oakland, where the late Rod Dibble held down the piano chair nightly for half a century, regaling patrons with some of the 4,000 songs he’d committed to memory.
“That’s where I learned standards,” she said. “Rod Dibble had a thing that if you were going to sing, the song had to be from the 1940s.”
But when Sauce went off to study psychology at UC Merced, she abandoned music (aside from singing the national anthem at her commencement). She went on to earn a graduate degree in linguistics from Cal State Stanislaus, and went on to join the faculty for several semesters.
By 2018 she had joined the corporate sector, working long hours for Louis Vuitton. Catching performances by vocalists while she was out and about in San Francisco reignited her interest in singing. Sauce started sitting in at clubs around town when the opportunities arose, tapping into the repertoire she’d learned at the Alley.
In early 2020 she launched her performing career with an EP and a website, persisting even as the pandemic shuttered most venues. After a few months, she was back at work.
“I had a great band that was willing to follow mask mandates,” she said. “We retained a lot of gigs.”
A weekly residency at the Page Bar in San Francisco, which was booked by the late pianist/accordionist Rob Reich, ran for two years and provided Sauce with a forum for workshopping new material. But it was connecting with veteran pianist and organist Adam Klipple that set her on the path to her gig Friday, Aug. 14 at the Back Room in Berkeley.
They first met on a gig at a memory care facility where Klipple, who has toured with Blood, Sweat & Tears, was a subbing for a friend. Impressed by her improvisational skills, responding to his playful musical asides, Klipple invited her to sit in with his soul quintet a few weeks later, “and I thought, ‘What an amazing soul singer,’” he said.
“I asked her to sing at my church in Oakland, and she wowed the congregation. And all this time she was writing song after song, all with an effortless melodic sense. When she finally shared a song with me, I immediately offered to produce her new record.”
They previewed the project, “This Must Be the Place,” with a sold-out duo gig in May as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival.
He’s encouraged her far-flung musical curiosity, which encompasses straight-ahead jazz, blues, Brazilian music, soul, funk and folk traditions, and they plan to record the new material in September.
“It’s a real mind melding,” Sauce said. “Any musical idea I have, he’ll polish it and make it a reality. It’s been such a beautiful collaborative experience.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
RHONDA SAUCE
Performing with Sundra Manning Organ Trio: 8 p.m. Aug. 1 at The Jazzschool, Berkeley; $25; jazzschool.org
Performing “New Songs, New Stories, New Sounds”: 8 p.m. Aug. 14 at The Back Room; $20-$25; backroommusic.com