"Teaching was what I was supposed to do—the [music] gigs are what I could do,” says an emphatic Germaine Bazzle, the 2015 recipient of OffBeat’s Lifetime Achievement in Music Education award. “As far as I was concerned, I had the best of both worlds.”

Bazzle’s public persona is that of brilliant jazz vocalist whose accomplishments as such were acknowledged by her winning two Best of the Beat awards—in 1996 as the Best Contemporary Jazz Vocalist, and in 1997 in the Best Female Vocalist cate...