Where the poet left off.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

`I really can't complain,'' Luciana Souza said, laughing. ``It doesn't get any more exciting than this.''

Souza was on the phone from Los Angeles, where she was preparing to sing at Disney Hall in the April 24 premiere of a work that pianist Billy Childs wrote, setting to music six poems written by children in Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp.

On Thursday, Souza will perform with her jazz trio at the Shedd Concert Hall, singing several songs from her Pablo Neruda song cycle along with Brazilian and American standards from albums old and new.

After that she'll return to New York and begin relearning her part as a soloist in La Pasion Segun San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov, to be presented at this summer's Oregon Bach Festival.

She has a new album coming out in the United States on May 24. It is headed for worldwide distribution - a first for her - in September.

Recording ``Duos II'' was fun, she says. Now comes the work, "the so-called business part": doing publicity interviews, waiting for critical response and booking gigs here and in Europe, where distribution will focus on France, Portugal, Spain and England.

Souza has another jazz trio album in the works, headed for release early next year. And she also finds time to teach at the Manhattan School of Music.

Souza was born in Brazil and grew up in a Sao Paulo family of bossa nova musicians and songwriters. She recorded her first radio commercial when she was 3.

She still considers her native Portuguese "a delicious language to sing in" but didn't want to be categorized as "the Brazilian singer."

Two of her albums, "The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Other Songs" (2000) and "Brazilian Duos" (2001) both landed high on the New York Times list of the year's best jazz albums.

But in 2004, Souza took a minor musical detour by composing and recording "Neruda," a tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet.

"The poetry called me," she says. "I had been reading his poetry for years in Spanish, but when I decided to do a tribute, I wanted to do it in English. I've been living in the U.S. for so long, and I'm a U.S. citizen now."

Souza chose 10 poems, most of them early translations that Neruda himself had approved. Souza says they appealed to her because they struck her as "more pure," more like the original Spanish, including phrase repetition that was edited out of later translations.

``I had no sequence of ideas in mind,'' she says. ``Some of the poems are existential, some about love, some about the craft of writing, which is something I think a lot about as a singer, composer and musician. They just spoke to me.''

To set the poems to music, Souza started with solo piano pieces from ``Songs and Dances'' by Catalan composer Federico Mompou.

The music spoke to her as directly as Neruda's poetry. She went from there, trying to write music that ``wouldn't interfere with the poetry.''

Souza says the project was ``challenging, not difficult. It was fun and a great pleasure, not pain. I think it works in terms of what I set out to do."

The Neruda song cycle is an hour long, but at the Shedd on Thursday, Souza will sing only three or four of the pieces, accompanied by pianist Edward Simon, her collaborator on the album.

Simon is one-third of Souza's trio. The others are drummer Clarence Penn (who performed at the Shedd with the Dave Douglas Quintet) and bassist Scott Colley (who played here with Herbie Hancock's Directions in Music). This is the same trio with which Souza recorded "North and South," her 2003 album of Brazilian and American standards.

The Shedd concert will include selections from that album and others, including the newest, "Duos II."

This will not be Souza's first Eugene performance, nor her last. In 1996, she was an Oregon Bach Festival soloist in "Oceana," a cantata by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov.

Golijov had heard Souza singing on the radio in Boston, and he convinced her to step outside her comfort zone as a jazz singer.

"I had sung in a chorus in high school, but never in front of a chorus as a soloist," she recalls. "I'm not a choral singer and never will be, but Osvaldo assured me that he would respect my sound and who I was. Everything was so foreign to me - the protocol, the rigidity, everything. But I'm glad I did `Oceana.' It was a very, very important piece for me. It took away all my fear of such music."

And Souza was one of the soloists when Golijov's Pasion Segun San Marcos had its world premiere in Germany.

She has since performed Golijov's Pasion with major U.S. orchestras and at the Ravinia Festival, alongside soprano Dawn Upshaw.

She will sing the piece again at the Oregon Bach Festival on June 24, with conductor Maria Guinand and the Schola Cantorum of Caracas, Venezuela.

PREVIEW

Luciana Souza

What: Selections from her Pablo Neruda song cycle and jazz standards from North and South America, with a trio

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday

Where: Shedd Concert Hall, 285 E. Broadway

Tickets: $35, $29 and $25 (434-7000)

CAPTION(S):

Luciana Souza is a Brazilian-born jazz singer who has more recently begun crossing over into choral music. She will perform a range of her work when she visits Eugene this week.