Paula West, an artist JazzTimes calls “the finest jazz-cabaret singer around,” celebrates the 25th anniversary of her 1998 debut album Temptation.

The San Francisco jazz treasure is not the kind of singer who uses her voice like an instrument, improvising long scat solos. West prefers to work around the edges of a melody, stretching a word here or clipping a phrase there so that each piece sounds as if it was written with her voice in mind. When not enthralling Bay Area audiences, West has become a Manhattan fixture, earning New York Nightlife Awards for “Outstanding Female Jazz Vocalist.” In 2013, trumpet luminary Wynton Marsalis recruited her to sing the lead role in the reprise of his Pulitzer Prize-winning opus Blood On the Fields.