Sarah Vaughan winner and UM alum Kate Kortum closes CAP’s 41st summer season

Close-up portrait of a blonde woman wearing red lipstick and holding red fabric against a vivid red background.

Jazz vocalist Kate Kortum closes the Community Arts Program’s 41st Summer Concert Series Thursday at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ.

By Coral Gables Gazette staff

Jazz vocalist Kate Kortum returns Thursday to a city where part of her musical career took shape — this time as the winner of one of jazz’s prominent international vocal competitions.

Kortum, a 2023 graduate of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and a 2025 Juilliard graduate, will close the Community Arts Program’s 41st consecutive Summer Concert Series at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ on Thursday, August 20. The performance comes nine months after she won the 2025 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

A prize-winning return to Miami

Kortum, 24, took first place in the competition Nov. 23 after being selected from more than 200 entries submitted by vocalists from 27 countries. She received the $5,000 top prize after performing before judges Christian McBride, Ann Hampton Callaway, Jon Faddis, Nnenna Freelon and Janis Siegel.

The competition, often called the SASSY Awards in honor of Newark-born jazz legend Sarah Vaughan, has produced a notable roster of winners. They include five-time Grammy Award winner Samara Joy as well as Cyrille Aimée and Jazzmeia Horn.

For Kortum, Thursday’s performance also amounts to a return to her musical roots in South Florida. Before earning her master’s degree at Juilliard, the Houston native studied jazz voice at Frost, graduating in 2023. She has said that her years in Miami helped shape both her musicianship and the artistic relationships she still carries with her.

Since winning the Sarah Vaughan competition, Kortum has toured internationally, including performances in Europe, Canada and Asia. She told Artburst Miami that returning to Miami now feels different after what she described as a year of significant musical and personal change.

Standards through a female lens

Kortum has already performed at Birdland, Blue Note, Mezzrow, Dizzy’s Club and Jazz at Lincoln Center and has collaborated with musicians including Bryan Carter, Peter Bernstein and Wynton Marsalis, as well as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Her two albums, Good Woman and Wild Woman, reinterpret jazz standards through what she describes as a distinctly female perspective. Good Woman, released in 2023, recast standards originally written by men; Wild Woman, released in 2025, continued that approach across bebop, blues and the Great American Songbook. Together, the albums have accumulated more than 5.1 million streams, according to Kortum’s biography.

Kortum also performs with The Sunhouse Singers, a New York vocal trio with June Cavlan and Joie Bianco that has appeared in projects by Bryan Carter, Charlie Rosen, Christian Wiggs and Emmet Cohen, including Cohen’s “Live from Emmet’s Place.”

Closing a six-concert summer

Kortum closes a season that began June 11 with the cello-driven crossover duo Empire Wild and continued with saxophonist Langston Hughes II, vibraphonist Warren Wolf, classical guitarist Leonela Alejandro and pianist Clayton Stephenson, the first Black finalist in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

The Community Arts Program says its Summer Concert Series has attracted more than 70,000 concertgoers since 1985. During the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021, virtual broadcasts averaged about 7,500 views each summer. CAP also operates year-round after-school music education through its Conservatory for the Arts and Miami Jazz Institute, which this year reaches children and youth from more than 59 Miami-Dade County schools.

The concerts are presented inside Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, itself one of the city’s earliest landmarks. The congregation was founded in 1923, construction began the following year and the church was dedicated in 1925. Designed by Kiehnel & Elliott in the Mediterranean Revival style, it became Florida’s first church listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

If you go…

Kate Kortum performs Thursday, Aug. 20, at 7:30 p.m. at Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ, 3010 De Soto Blvd., across from the Biltmore Hotel.

General admission tickets are $35 in advance or $40 at the door. Patron tickets, which include reserved seating within rows one through nine, are $50 in advance or $55 at the door. Parking is free. Tickets may be ordered through the Community Arts Program or by calling 305-448-7421, ext. 120.