If we haven't heard of Fabiana Cozza until now, that's nobody's fault but ours. That problem will be easily corrected when the extravagantly gifted Brazilian makes her first appearances in Canada, with MusicFest Vancouver shows on August 15 at VanDusen Botanical Garden and August 16 at the Cellar Jazz Club.

Although already popular in her native São Paulo, and performing with increasing frequency in Rio de Janeiro (especially since she recently married a Carioca, and maintains homes in both megacities), the deep-voiced singer has musical inclinations that tie her unmistakably to the Africanized region of Bahia and the Northeast.

Cozza sang in church as a child and started taking it seriously as a teenager, studying technique at the prestigious Centro de Estudos Musicais Tom Jobim, also in São Paulo. But she was even more influenced by her father, an economist who annually put down his books to do lead vocals for a large and famous samba group.

“Noel Rosa says you can't learn samba in the school,” says Cozza, on the line from SP and referring to one of the pioneer composers of the dance-minded, if often melancholy, song style that Carmen Miranda popularized. “You have to feel it everywhere in your body and let it take over.”

In fact, she studied journalism and worked in that field until the age of 24, when her performing side staged a coup. She was soon championed by much older singers Leny Andrade and Alcione, whom she calls her biggest influences. Tonally, she also recalls the late Clara Nunes, who heralded a return to earthy samba singing. If anything, Cozza is a bigger roots fanatic, and she performs in the flowing dresses and colorful baiana turbans of several generations ago, mixing dramatic gesture and ecstatic movement with her thrilling alto gymnastics.

“I continued studying with five or six different teachers,” she explains, partially in English and sometimes with the help of a translator, “but the moment I became an artist was the moment my feeling about the music changed.”

Of course, she was lucky to come of age just as a passion for samba, baião, forró, and other pre–bossa nova forms exploded in Brazil and elsewhere.

“Samba never died. In 110 years, samba changed its clothes many times, and there have been many ways to tell the same stories. From there, I have continued to research all the musics of the world that have something to do with Africa—because Africa is the mother of all music.”

She even finds kinship with the music of Edith Piaf, and recently gave a big concert entirely in French. She promises to make time, while here in Vancouver, for a Piaf tune or two with the quartet that has been accompanying her for roughly seven years. Cozza is finding cousins around the world, and you may kick yourself if you miss this family reunion.