Stacy Rowles has learned well from her dad

Stacy Rowles had the great good fortune to have a parent, pianist Jimmy Rowles, who was one of the Southland’s most admired jazz artists. More than that, she had the opportunity to share his music and the wisdom to receive his knowledge. Jimmy Rowles probably didn’t anticipate that his daughter, now 47, would choose to become one of the rare female trumpet-fluegelhorn players. But their performances together, in the years before his death in 1996, afforded rare and memorable jazz pleasures.

Wednesday at Spazio in Sherman Oaks, Stacy Rowles, now leading her own group, displayed how well she has learned the lessons her father taught her.

Working with a sterling rhythm section -- Jeff Colella, piano; Putter Smith, bass; and Kendall Kay, drums -- she played and sang with an admirable sense of pace and timing.

Her program was an attractive mix of familiar tunes (“All the Things You Are,” “Take the ‘A’ Train”) and more unfamiliar items (“Beautiful Love,” “A June Night, the Moonlight and You” and her father’s poignant “Looking Back”).

Rowles’ fluegelhorn playing, even more than her trumpet work, combined a warm, often sensuous sound with briskly swinging, melodically based improvisations. She was joined in that approach by Colella, whose soloing was similarly concerned with airy, inventive melody-making.

Capping a program of elegant, imaginative music, there was Rowles’ singing. Although she is better known as an instrumentalist, her warm-toned vocals moved confidently from sweetly intimate balladry to in-the-pocket, swinging grooves. And watching Stacy Rowles in action, masterfully displaying her craft, one could easily imagine Jimmy Rowles, somewhere, listening to the set and smiling proudly.