Tessa Souter has wanted a career in music, she says, ever since she "knew that there was such a thing as a career in music." She just took a particularly circuitous route to get there.

Born to a Trinidadian father and an English mother, who raised her in London, Souter may have been genetically predisposed to the blend of cultures reflected in her music, which contains Middle Eastern, Brazilian and flamenco elements in an airy jazz framework. Certainly, she was raised on music.

"My mother taught me to sing when I was three. Her friends would come over and I'd be singing all these dreadful grown-up songs. There's this one song called "He'll Have to Go,' which is about some man having an affair. These lyrics are absolutely outrageous! How could you let a 3-year-old sing this? But they all clapped, and I got a lot of positive feedback from it."

But her musical aspirations were derailed temporarily by the birth of her son, after which she became a journalist, a career choice that eventually brought her Stateside, to her new home. "I went to San Francisco for a week, but I never got around to leaving. I stayed for four years."

Souter set herself up as "our man in Havana" for British magazines including Vogue and Elle. "At the time in England, everyone was very interested in what was happening in America," she explains. While in San Francisco she co-founded the Writers Grotto, a literary collective that gathered six writers, journalists and filmmakers under one roof, and has since grown in size and stature.

It was her then-boyfriend, a musicologist and singer for the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, who encouraged Souter to return to music. "He thought it was very silly that I wasn't doing it, and he took it upon himself to take me to open mics or jam sessions. And people would just always come up and say, "Where can I hear you perform?' and I was like, "Oh, well, actually, nowhere.'"

That audience response convinced Souter to pursue music full time, especially after she moved to New York. There, she won a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music, which she left after one semester to study privately under vocalist Mark Murphy. "One of the biggest things I think he did for me was he kind of dirtied me up. When I first started singing I was really wanting to be perfect. But he taught me, I suppose, to take more chances."

"Dirtied up" isn't the first description that comes to mind when listening to the crystalline clarity of Souter's voice. But the directness of emotion conveyed by her uncluttered delivery exemplifies the ideal of expression over technique that Murphy stressed. Unlike many jazz singers, who either emulate the brassy blasts of a trumpet or the gymnastic lines of a saxophone, Souter uses the sustained waves of a violinist. Her voice is sinuous and elastic, stretching and caressing a melody with an actress' sense of the emotional meaning of each lyric.

Souter's debut, Listen Love (Nara), is striking for reasons beyond her voice, however. First, the CD is refreshingly free of the Great American Songbook. The closest Souter comes to a standard is her snake-charming rendition of "Caravan." Otherwise the album is full of more obscure covers (Jon Lucien's "Listen Love," Jobim's "Insensatez"), her own lyrics for other composers' music (Pat Martino's "Willow," Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez"), one original, and her rendition of Sting's "Fragile," fast becoming a modern jazz standard.

Secondly, there is the sparse production, with none of the lush settings in which many singers prefer to drown themselves. Despite her predilection for images of nature, Souter's arrangements are set in a stark noir landscape, isolated if not exactly lonely. The songs are largely bass-driven, with a guitarist freed to interweave with the singer's voice, and an occasional light touch of percussion sounding as if it were wafting in through the walls from somewhere else. "I guess I just like a lot of space. One of my favorite musicians is Miles Davis, and he just left so much space. I like the sparseness which kind of draws attention to the lyric and to the song and to the melody. And most of the songs I sing, you could sing them a cappella, they're such interesting melody lines."

Even her rendition of Pharaoh Sanders and Leon Thomas' "The Creator Has a Master Plan" is transformed from a group incantation to a private, joyful song of praise. "That song for me is kind of redemptive," says Souter. Her view of the song seems especially relevant given her recent trip back home to London, immediately after the bombings. "Whatever's happened, this lovely idea that the creator has a master plan is very beguiling. That everything happens for a reason, even bad things."

Tessa Souter Quartet plays Sat., Aug. 27, 9 p.m.-1 a.m., $12, Chris' Jazz Cafe, 1421 Sansom St., 215-568-3131, www.chrisjazzcafe.com.