Brazilian Is at Home North of the Border : Keyboardist: Eliane Elias, who appears Sunday at the Performing Arts Center, grew up on American jazz, and it shows in her straight musical style.

They seem made for each other: Brazilian-born keyboardist Eliane Elias (pronounced ill-ee-AH-nee ill-EE-us ) and the music of her fellow countryman, Antonio Carlos Jobim. But Elias’ latest album of the composer’s tunes is no exercise in south-of-the-border rhythms and moods, but a formidable jazz outing that doesn’t exploit the usual samba format.

“The idea was to do something different, something other people haven’t done,” the pianist said earlier this week from San Francisco. “So many musicians have done Jobim in the bossa-nova way. I wanted to do it in a jazzier way, even though it was a bit of work to get his music right for a trio.”

Despite her heritage, the straight-ahead treatment is a natural for Elias, who appears Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on a bill with keyboardist Bobby Lyle. As a child in Sao Paulo, she was exposed to the music of Art Tatum, Bud Powell and a host of other American jazz artists.

“I grew up listening to Brazilian music, but my mother played classical and was a big jazz fan,” she said. “Of all the things I heard, jazz was the most interesting. I heard a lot more jazz than the average American.”

Elias began piano lessons at age 7 and by the time she was 12 had transcribed the work of Powell, Tatum, Wynton Kelly and Red Garland from albums she dug out of Sao Paulo record shops. Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock were her big inspirations and, as a teen-ager, she told anyone who’d listen that one day she would move to New York and play jazz. “I looked at the back of the record covers and saw most of the recording was done there,” she said. “I knew in my heart New York was the place to be.”

Encouragement toward that end came in 1981, when she met one of her heroes, bassist Eddie Gomez, while both were in Paris.

“I played him my tape, and right away he said, ‘You must go to New York,’ ” she said. “I respected his playing so much. It was the last little push that I needed.”

Things moved quickly when she arrived in Manhattan, and soon she was gigging with Gomez, drummer Peter Erskine (a member of her trio on the current tour) and percussionist Nana Vasconceles, all, at the time, members of vibist Mike Mainieri’s band Steps Ahead.

When her manager suggested she make an American demo tape, she called Gomez, and “all of a sudden I was in the studio with Steps Ahead.” Mainieri was so impressed with her style that he signed her to replace keyboardist Don Grolnick. She spent a year traveling with the group.

“I loved my time with Steps Ahead but wanted to express my own music,” she said of her decision to leave.

Her subsequent solo efforts have featured some of her former idols, including Gomez and drummer Jack DeJohnette. She compares her forthcoming album to 1989’s “So Far, So Close,” which moved away from the trio format by adding horns and, on some tracks, Elias’ synthesizer in the background.

“I use it to add colors to my writing,” said Elias, promising to perform some of the new tunes on Sunday as well as numbers from the Jobim recording and her previous trio efforts. “There’s a lot of (my) voice and percussion and guitar on the new album. It doesn’t feature me as a pianist so much, but mostly as a composer and arranger. I’ve written all 11 tunes, beginning to end, and it was a lot of work.”

But Elias says the album’s basic tracks are done on acoustic piano.

“I just prefer the acoustic; it’s closer to my heart,” she said. “I can express myself better with the sound of the instrument than with synthesizer.”

Elias, who has a daughter in the first grade living with her in New York, visits her family in Brazil at least twice a year.

“The environment there makes me write in a different, more open way.”

The Eliane Elias Trio (with bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Peter Erskine) and the Bobby Lyle Quintet (with guitarist Paul Jackson, saxophonist James Perkins, bassist Larry Kimpel and drummer Michael Baker) appear at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $14 to $25. Information: (714) 556-2787.