She Wants to Say It in Her Singing : Jazz: Yvette Stewart sees music as communication, and she’ll mix in pop, blues or gospel styles to get her feelings across.

“You’re listening to who ?”

That’s what singer Yvette Stewart’s teen-age friends used to ask her in the ‘60s when she told them she was checking out such jazz artists as Ella Fitzgerald and Nancy Wilson instead of the popular vocal groups of the day such as the Temptations and the Four Tops.

“I’ve always been a jazz person,” said Stewart, who appears with pianist Rob Mullins Sunday at El Matador in Huntington Beach. “I was inundated with it from the time I was born. My father, Eddie Hammond, was a bass player in a house band at a jazz club in San Francisco, where he backed people like Billie Holiday and Teddy Edwards, and he and my stepmother played a lot of records.”

Stewart, who possesses a rich and resonant alto voice and who works with considerable feeling and emotion, heard something in those renditions by Wilson, Fitzgerald and others that prompted her to become a professional.

“I loved the way Ella scat sang, the way Nancy took her blues and gospel influences and used them to make a tune her own. I wanted to do that,” the Sacramento-born, San Francisco-reared vocalist said in a phone interview from her home in Granada Hills.

The freedom and breadth of jazz appeals to Stewart because it allows her to constantly evolve and make her renditions personal.

“I like to improvise on my melody; I love taking chances,” said Stewart, who declined to give her age. “Those are facets of what I try to put into a song to make it my own.

“Technically, I might bend certain notes, or scat, or mix in a little pop, blues and gospel into my style. It’s all part of getting a particular song across, of letting people know what I’m feeling about the music.”

Stewart said that although she offers a wide array of tunes when she performs, she feels most at home on songs that are either heartbeat slow or taken at a finger-snapping medium clip.

“I love something that grooves, that you can pat your foot to,” she said. “Rob and I have been having a lot of fun doing that in duo situations, getting into the ‘pocket,’ as musicians say, and having a ball.”

Oozing ballads draw Stewart because “you have the time and the musical space to think about a tune, about the way you want to put a lyric across, to really tell a

story,” she said.

The singer also has a fondness for scat singing, whereby she can drop the lyrics and make up the syllable sounds herself “like an instrumentalist,” she said.

Stewart lived and worked in Denver--where she met Mullins--for more than a decade before moving to Los Angeles in 1983. For the last couple of years, Stewart has performed in Orange County with singers Stephanie Haynes, Barbara Morrison and Julie Kelly in a foursome they call Ladies Sing the Blues. Although she has yet to make a solo record, she has appeared on others’ albums, including Mullins’ debut, “Dancing Through the Day” on the pianist’s Flying Piano Records.

Mullins, who settled in Los Angeles in 1987, remains Stewart’s favorite accompanist.

“He’s always so enthusiastic about what he’s doing, not one who’ll just do the job and then go home,” she said. “The way he states a melody, the way he plays chords, it gives me a buoyancy, a positivity. He gives me ideas.”

It was while working with Mullins’ contemporary jazz group in Denver that Stewart began writing her own songs. “I didn’t think I could write, but he told me, ‘You’re the singer--write your own songs,’ ” she recalled. “Since then I’ve come up with a couple of pretty good tunes.” Two were recorded by an Ohio-based singer named Leah Roberts. Another, “I’m the One,” was recorded by Mullins on “Dancing Through the Day.”

Whereas Stewart was able to make a living singing in Denver--”I was like the jazz singer there”--she hasn’t been as fortunate in Los Angeles. That’s despite regular appearances with Mullins, saxophonist Pete Christlieb and others, occasional studio session calls and a weeklong stint in Japan with Mullins and saxophonist Wilton Felder. So she makes ends meet by working part time in secretarial positions.

“Musically, Los Angeles is a buyer’s market,” she explained. “What sells is what’s currently hip, and jazz is always struggling. Still, I’ve committed myself to jazz.”

And with no real regrets, Stewart added. “Singing is something I enjoy, and if I make money too, then that’s great,” she said. “It allows me to open myself up to people, to give them my feelings or needs or whatever, to put out what I’m thinking, what I hear in the music. Music’s a good communication device, and since I like people, it’s my way of being involved with them.”

Yvette Stewart performs Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m. at El Matador, 16903 Algonquin St., Huntington Beach. Admission: free. Information: (714) 846-5337.