Importing Sounds of South America : Music: Singer-pianist Tania Maria will infuse the Coach House with her blend of jazz, salsa and Brazilian rhythms.

The stage is set for musical fireworks Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. Brazilian singer-pianist Tania Maria can reliably be expected to explode on stage with the hair-trigger combustibility of a dozen Fourth of July celebrations.

And explode is the right word for Maria. At 44, she has lost none of the startling energy that has characterized her unique combination of jazz, salsa and Brazilian rhythms since she first arrived in the United States to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival in the mid-’70s.

Maria’s evaluation of her work is more modest. “Oh, I still try to do my best,” she explains in her Portuguese-accented English. Speaking by phone from a tour stop in San Francisco, she said: “But now that I’m in my 40s, I can’t do what I did when I was in my 20s. I don’t have the same kind of agility. So I do as much as I think I can do.

“The problem,” she continued, “and maybe it’s not really a problem, is that music doesn’t have any limits, but human beings do.”

Her reservations aside, Maria’s music has left few audiences untouched. Reviews of her most recent album, “Bela Vista” (on Blue Note/World Pacific) effusively described the album as “breathtakingly original,” “a universe of pleasure” and called her “Brazil’s most complete singer since Flora Purim.”

In her concerts, which are like personal, interactive happenings, audiences often clap along--not because Maria has clapped to signal them, but because she has imperiously placed her hands on her hips, gazed out at the crowd and said, simply, “Clap!”

At the center of her performances--of her music--is the piano. Ripping off complex Latin rhythms, scatting and whistling in unison with soaring right-hand lines, murmuring throaty cries over lush harmonies, Maria seems almost inseparable from her instrument.

“My piano is what I count on--for everything,” she says. “It’s part of my body, part of my soul. I don’t think that I could communicate without my piano. Look, I’m not the kind of singer who can grab the microphone and--pow!--deliver the message. My method is to bring everything together through my piano and my voice.”

Maria, born in northeast Brazil and raised in Rio de Janeiro, studied classical piano for six years. She began leading her own groups as a teen-ager and was strongly supported by her father, a guitarist and singer who encouraged her to participate in his weekend jam sessions. In those get-togethers, she performed jazz, samba, bossa nova and the Brazilian improvisational music known as choro .

“My father passed away two years ago,” Maria said. “And he was my very best friend, the person that I used to connect with the most. When you have someone in your family who is into the music, it makes it easier to call up, from 12,000 miles away, and talk about how you’re feeling. You can talk in a musical way that makes it very easy.”

“So when I lost him, it was very difficult,” she said. “People sometimes have a problem mourning someone because they had problems with them. But my problem with my father was too much love. Even today--and I don’t mean to make this into a big drama--there is still a small place in my heart that screams for him.”

For the past decade, Maria has lived in New York City’s Greenwich Village, touring occasionally, appearing on television (“The Tonight Show,” “Late Night With David Letterman,” “Entertainment Tonight”), recording and exploring an emerging interest in producing other acts.

As do many expatriate Brazilians, however, she retains a powerful emotional connection with her native land. Intimately familiar with its past and present social and political difficulties, Maria identifies with artists who, for generations, have had to function in a troubled society.

“It doesn’t matter what the country is,” she said. “When the situation is bad, there is only one way to say what you really think, and that is through art. Brazil has had constant struggles--economic, social, political. And music is the only thing that has really been able to give us a little break.

“I think Brazilians are a little tired of being considered an unstable Third World country. People still think only about its political problems and, sometimes, its soccer and its samba. But now, you see, one has to think of music when one thinks of Brazil. Because when it comes to music, you know we’re not a Third World country.”

Maria’s plans call for the release of a new album next year, more touring, some experimentation with longer compositions and possible film scoring. But, despite the scope of her activities, she is without guile or vanity in anticipating her musical pathway.

“There are musicians who are creators; there are musicians who are interpreters, and there are musicians who are leaders,” Maria said. “I place myself as an amateur--I love music; that’s my qualification. I know many musicians who don’t love music, they use the music. But me, I’m just a big lover of music.”

* Tania Maria and Sound Minds play Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $18.50. (714) 496-8930.