Jazz Singer Goes With the Flow : Performance: Cathy Segal-Garcia, who appears Sunday at El Matador, has an at-ease rhythmic sense and soothing voice.

Most jazz singers name other singers as their idols. Cathy Segal-Garcia names a trumpeter: Miles Davis.

“I like to sing with a controlled voice. I don’t like belting,” she said. “Miles didn’t belt out very much. His playing was more of a color, a feeling, a sensation.”

Segal-Garcia said she tries to instill the subtle qualities that imbued Davis’ best work in her jazz vocalizing. “There’s a fineness in my work, and by that I don’t mean a quality of my voice, but more of an aesthetic,” Segal-Garcia, 37, said in a recent phone interview from the home in North Hollywood she shares with her husband, guitarist-songwriter Gus Garcia.

“This is hard to explain,” she continued, “but I feel like there’s a flow that comes out of me and the flow is fine-tuned. Performing is just a reflection of who I am as a person, and I like to think that flow is in me all the time. When people tell me how I come across, they talk about that quality.”

The Boston native has a soothing alto voice, and an at-ease rhythmic sense that seems ideally suited for the heavily melodic vehicles she chooses, from standards such as Jerome Kern’s “Dearly Beloved” to her own “The Story,” a perky, contemporary number.

“My style is definitely jazz, with a modern slant,” said Segal-Garcia. “By modern, I don’t mean ‘fusion,’ ” but more the Latin-pop-jazz mode of such pieces as “500 Miles High” and “Spain” that Chick Corea wrote for the early ‘70s group, Return to Forever, which featured vocalist Flora Purim.

These days, Segal-Garcia has a jazz career that’s motoring right along. Last year, she spent three months in Europe, a month in Japan and worked three to four nights a week when she was home in Southern California. This year, she’s been a regular at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in Santa Monica. She appears Sunday at El Matador in Huntington Beach with pianist Karen Hammack, bassist Luther Hughes and drummer Mark Pulice.

Occasionally she takes an R & B job, and admitted that in those situations she gets to let loose more. “I like to shout. Hey, Aretha Franklin and Chaka Khan were some of the people I listened to when I was younger,” she said. “I mostly sing that style (during) one-nighters at parties or functions.”

Segal-Garcia said she has a dream of putting together a band that mixes R & B with jazz, but that hasn’t happened yet. One reason is simple practicality. “My life seems to swing to jazz. Ninety-five percent of the work calls I get are for jazz jobs,” she said. But she and Hammack have discussed forming a vocal-instrumental band that’s patterned on Weather Report, the popular jazz-fusion ensemble of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Hammack and Segal-Garcia are one of those hand-in-glove fits, the singer said. “Our rhythmic sense is similar, she accompanies wonderfully, she can swing so hard she raises the hair off the back of my neck, and she can be totally sensitive. That’s the ideal scene,” she said.

Segal-Garcia is one of those people who, as a child, never asked the question, “What am I going to do when I grow up?”

“I’ve always sung,” she said. “I can remember when I was 7 and my father, who was a saxophonist, was painting the living room and I was sort of helping him while I sang along to a record by Ella Fitzgerald. . . . Beginning when I was 12, my twin sisters, who are four years older, and I used to sing on my father’s gigs.”

But there have been periods when Segal-Garcia was not nearly so confident about where her career was heading, or why she was singing.

Take the time in 1972 when she was 18, attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and was concentrating so heavily on her composing and arranging studies that she had all but given up singing.

“I kind of lost my feeling for it,” she said.

But when she put together a trio at school and sang mostly for fun, she found her calling hadn’t been lost.

“I got the magic going again and realized I would be a singer no matter how much time I took off, that I was capable of it,” she said.

Then, in 1979, after she’d moved to Los Angeles and married Garcia, she had to cross another bridge. Her performances were imbued with such influences as Fitzgerald and Chaka Khan, but not enough of herself.

“I was set to do a job . . . in Studio City and Gus said to me, ‘Why don’t you drop all your favorite licks?’ ” Segal-Garcia recalled. “I tried it, feeling like I had my pants down, but when I did it, ‘me’ came out. It was the best advice I’ve ever gotten.”

Segal-Garcia spent most of the ‘80s doing small-room jazz jobs in and around Los Angeles, from Donte’s to Two Dollar Bills, though she had some stellar accompanists, including pianists David Benoit and Russell Ferrante. She has yet to make an album, but a Japanese production company has plans to record her this summer.

One thing she noticed as a child was that she liked the effect her singing had on people. It’s the same situation today. “In performance, it seems I give to the crowd, and they give back to me. That’s the best kind of reward in life,” she said.

Cathy Segal-Garcia sings Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m. at El Matador, 16903 Algonquin St., Huntington Beach. No cover, no minimum. Information: (714) 846-5337.