Mara Kaye sings blues songs that empower.

Acclaimed for celebrating vintage jazz and blues, Brooklyn-born Mara Kaye has been praised as “one of New York’s great gifts to the world.” Looking forward to performing at the Maui Jazz & Blues Festival show on Oct. 27 at the Ocean Organic Farm & Distillery, Kaye describes herself as “a brassy broad from Brooklyn.”

Kaye’s focus is “a lot of old, early blues with kind of an attention to women’s empowerment blues. I love the old blues that Memphis Minnie sings and Victoria Spivey sings and Sister Rosetta Tharpe — these really strong, beautiful women heroes of blues of mine that have shaped me from listening to them. I try and carry that sensibility with me when I’m on stage. The beautiful thing about the blues is it does allow the stories that they do relate to today, it is of the human condition.”

Beginning with musical theater in her teenage years, she went on to study theater and music at the Boston Conservatory.

“Ever since I was 10, I’ve been with teachers learning about my instrument,” she says. “And I spent a lot of time listening to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan when I was young.”

Encountering the songs of early 20th-century blues queen Victoria Spivey changed her life. “It was her voice that I heard of the older blues that really just knocked me to the floor,” Kaye says. “Somebody passed me this Victoria Spivey tune, called ‘Detroit Moan.’ It wasn’t the most beautiful singing, but it was the most raw, guttural, to the point singing. You just felt from the depths of your gut what this woman was feeling. I’ve never heard anyone sing like that before, and that started my journey, looking for more artists that sounded like her. Through her, I found Memphis Minnie and I’ve always loved Bessie Smith.”

Paying homage to the roots of the music she loved, Kaye was profoundly moved on a tour of the Deep South. She met Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, the last of the older generation bluesmen from Bentonia, Mississippi, and sang at the grave of Robert Johnson, and in the hotel room in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Bessie Smith died.

“It was so important to me to try and get as close to my heroes as possible,” she says. “It was incredibly emotional. The Riverside Hotel is where Bessie Smith took her last breath. That hotel existed because black musicians were not allowed to stay anywhere else in town when having concerts. So this hotel existed for these incredible creators of the roots of the music tree.”

At the hotel, she met one of the owners. “This little woman named Zee was at the door, and she was like, ‘we do have Bessie’s room and we always keep a record playing in her room.’ I said, do you think I could sing in her room? Do you think I could sing for her? She said, ‘I think she would love that.’ So I went into Bessie Smith’s room and I sang ‘Down Hearted Blues,” and just chilled myself to the bone and cried.”

Mining gems from the past, Kaye’s recent recording “It Had To Be You,” included “Black Sheep Blues” from 1935 by pianist/singer Pigmeat Terry, Mamie Smith’s “Goin’ Crazy With the Blues,” and the title track from 1924.

In April, she paid tribute to another idol, Billie Holiday, singing with the 11-piece Marlonius Jazz Orchestra in Los Angeles.

“She’s so important, just so uniquely herself,” says Kaye. “Nobody sounded like her. In honoring this beautiful, iconic singer, it’s so important to find your voice through these stories. I would never want to try to sound like anyone. I would never want to imitate.”

Among Kaye’s fans are Jimmy Vivino of The Tonight Show Band, who compared her voice to “Louis Armstrong’s trumpet at a rent party.” In September she performed with Vivino and blues guitar legend Joe Bonamassa at the Maui Sugar Mill Saloon in Tarzana, California.

“Especially today where it feels like we’re almost moving backwards with rights, if I can tell some stories that empower some women, then I’m doing okay,” she concludes. “Then our angels are feeling they’ve been heard and they’re supported.”

Mara Kaye will perform with her partner, multi-instrumentalist Tim McNalley at the the Ocean Organic Farm & Distillery in Kula on Oct. 27. Nolan Wren and Fast Freddy & Blue Lava Band will also perform. Music from 3 to 7:15 p.m. Admission is $5.