Susie Hansen Plugs Into a Powerful Musical Force : Jazz: The fiery Latin style of her band is a passion for the violinist and ignites her fans. She performs at SeaFest today.

What violinist Susie Hansen delivers can be summed up in a single word: energy.

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Hansen, who is becoming one of Southern California’s most popular Latin jazz artists, relates a story about the sixth annual Santa Barbara International Jazz Festival, an on-the-beach event that she headlined a week ago. Another act had preceded Hansen, and when she hit the stage, the audience was primed for her brand of fiery Latin-based jazz.

“Their music was good, but sort of pop-jazz and laid-back, and not real high energy,” she said. “It was a perfect setup for us, because the audience all stood up from the first note we played and stayed up the entire show.”

Plenty of pizazz is a trademark of a Hansen performance. At an outdoor date in Marina del Rey a month ago, she smiled engagingly while she played, getting the small crowd going with her band’s compelling rhythms and her own sinuous melodic lines.

Though the violinist has played be-bop and straight-ahead jazz, the driving rhythm and energy in Latin music has completely taken her.

“It goes to my soul,” she said in a recent phone conversation from her home in Los Angeles. “I get more and more crazy about it as time goes on, and, I think I play better and better.”

Hansen has had a terrific summer. She’s been a headliner at the recent African Marketplace in Los Angeles, and Fridays at the Whittier Hilton Hotel in Whittier. She performs today at 11:30 a.m. at SeaFest on the Balboa Pier in Newport Beach.

The Chicago native learned violin from her father, James Hansen, a violinist with the Chicago Symphony for 35 years. She is reaching many more fans these days via her debut CD, “Solo Flight,” which she financed herself and released on her own Jazz Caliente label a year ago. It has since sold about 3,000 copies. “I haven’t broken even yet,” said Hansen.

But potential financial reward is not nearly as important as the feedback she’s been getting.

“It’s the most gratifying thing to have someone say that they play your record every morning, or every day coming home from work,” she said. “In Santa Barbara, two people came up and requested original songs of ours, and they could only know those tunes because they own the record. It makes you feel great.”

“Solo Flight” is a captivating recording, and includes an appealing variety of material in such Latin forms as the mambo, rumba, merengue and cha-cha.

Among the highlights are the upbeat title track, the equally zesty “Circles,” written by Hansen and co-producer/trombonist David Stout respectively, the more somber Hansen composition, “Es Muy Tarde,” and the evocative “Beautiful Maria of My Soul,” the theme from the 1992 film “The Mambo Kings.”

Hansen said she that although she previously had written and arranged some of the music her band plays, her desire to compose intensified when she started to work on the album.

“My passion for writing grew enormously because I was getting a chance to express my creativity in two ways,” she said. “I was still getting a chance to play solos and interpret songs, but now they were my songs. That really motivated me.”

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Currently in the process of gathering material for her next project, Hansen said she has been edging away from the strictly salsa rooms, where she initially built her reputation, and is now focusing more on playing venues that cater mainly to Latin jazz. The change boiled down to the kinds of audiences she was drawing.

“The real difference is that when you play Latin jazz, people listen more, whereas in a salsa club, you’re just a dance band,” she said. “To play just for dancers is good, but . . . a lot of the creativity in a show comes from the interaction with an audience. If they’re not listening,” something is missing.

Hansen has been leading her own bands for 10 years, five of those in the Windy City, and five in Southern California, where she’s lived since 1988. She said that playing gives her something she can’t get anywhere else.

“Playing music is like a prayer, a meditation,” she said. “I go to a different place when I play, a place of concentration, pleasure and unimpeded communication with both the people I’m playing with, and the audience. It’s almost like you have a chance to relate to people in a way that is un-self-conscious, with pure communication that is without barriers and concerns of judgment somehow.”

* Susie Hansen’s Latin jazz band plays today at SeaFest on the Balboa Pier, Balboa Boulevard and A Street, Newport Beach. 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Free. (714) 644-3151. Hansen also plays every Friday, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Whittier Hilton Hotel, 7320 Greenleaf Ave., Whittier. Free. (310) 945-8511.