Sachal Vasandani, photo by Raj Naik.

Jazz vocalists who write their own material is a relative rarity in today’s jazz world. Audiences and record labels tend to favor singers who stick to the classic jazz repertoire from decades past. The singers themselves are partly to blame because such a small percentage are willing to take any real risks, which is antithetical to jazz’s growth. Sachal Vasandani is an artist who tries to balance all of the tensions that face a contemporary jazz vocalist, juxtaposing his original material and compositions outside of the jazz idiom with more traditional standards.

“It’s just a matter of making an over-arching statement,” said Vasandani during a recent interview with DCist. “It can be all original or all standards, or in my case, I put my songs up against the standards and if they don’t make it within that arc, that’s fine.”

Vasandani, who was an investment banker on Wall Street in a previous life, will be in the area on Sunday for an evening performance at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. Not a stranger to the area, he was a semi-finalist in the 2005 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and also made regular appearances at Twins Jazz.

“They were so sweet to us but so overwhelmed with the crowd we brought out,” Vasandani said of those gigs. “I remember one time some crazy guy, who was African-American, came up to our drummer, who is also African-American, called him out for not hanging around black people. We laughed about it afterwards.”