Teka Blends Guitar Skills With Her Velvety Vocals

Brazilian singer-guitarist Teka spends most of her time in the Santa Barbara area, making occasional forays into Los Angeles every month or so. When she does, the event is well worth seeking out--she is one of Brazil’s most appealing contributions to Southland music.

In her Saturday night late set at Spazio in Sherman Oaks, she displayed a range of talents that clearly stamped her as an artist with potential reaching well beyond her local gigs. Start with the fact that she is a fine guitarist with a velvety sounding voice, then add an innate musicality that touched every aspect of her performance.

But what made Teka’s work even more convincing was the manner in which she joined her instrumental and vocal skills. Like Joao Gilberto, she brought everything into a unified expression, combining her vocal lines and rhythmic guitar accompaniments into a single, elegantly buoyant musical blend.

In the case of bossa nova era hits such as “Samba de Uma Nota So” and “O Barquinho,” Teka updated the familiar lines with brisk, jazz-oriented backing from bassist Randy Tico, drummer Kevin Winard and trumpeter-keyboardist Jeff Elliott. Her approach to jazz and ballad classics was even more intriguing, investing them with the ineffable spirit of Brazil. Toots Thielemans’ jazz classic “Bluesette,” for example, was delivered over a simmering, samba-tinged undercurrent of rhythm; the long, floating melody of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low” became--in Teka’s arching interpretation--a tune that might easily have surfaced on the sunny beach at Ipanema.

Tico’s bass playing and Winard’s drumming were particularly vital supplements to Teka’s singing, empathetically interacting with her subtle shifts of emphasis. Elliott’s role was somewhat more enigmatic. Seated at the front of the stage, doing a one-man-band stunt of simultaneously playing trumpet or flugelhorn with one hand and a keyboard instrument with the other, his presence was a frequent distraction. His first-rate brass instrument solos, had they been offered as a less obtrusive, more supportive complement to Teka’s performance, would have made for a far more balanced musical presentation.