The “jazz” festival is an increasingly flexible concept, but of all the pop acts booked to play the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival this year, Erykah Badu probably has the strongest claim to the honour. Without her early introduction to jazz, she says, she might be performing in another discipline altogether.

“I went to the school of arts in Dallas, Texas, and my best friend there was Roy Hargrove, who was a trumpeter,” Badu explains, on the line from the Texas city that’s still her home. “He was playing the trumpet like a grown man when he was in the eighth grade, and I learned a lot of things about jazz from him. He introduced me to Thelonious Monk and to Miles Davis and to Sun Ra and to Oscar Peterson—all these wonderful players. It was an education, especially because at that time I didn’t know I would be a singer. I was a dancer at that school: ballet, modern jazz, and tap, and I’d started that at about four years old. That’s what I was going to do, but then I fell into the world of jazz music, and I felt it innately.”

As a singer, Badu is often compared to the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday. Like her admitted idol, she doesn’t have the biggest voice, but she’s been blessed with the power to communicate.

And, again like Holiday, she takes her cues from instrumentalists as much as from other singers: Lady Day emulated her friend Lester Young’s saxophone, while Badu’s phrasing owes a lot to Hargrove’s trumpet—and to another, more surprising source.

“I usually compare my voice to a clarinet,” she explains. “There’s something very nasal and mid-range about the clarinet that reminds me of me, and I first heard a clarinet on Popeye the Sailor cartoons. Those were from the Benny Goodman era, I’m guessing, but I felt like ‘Hey, this is something I like! This is something I feel!’ ”

These days, Badu is focusing more on drumming than on jazz reeds, however. Although she declines to say when her long-awaited sixth studio album will drop—“I don’t ever go by a deadline or any of that stuff,” she notes—she does allow that she’s spent the last couple of years gathering inspiration.

“I’ve been travelling around the world collecting drums,” she explains. “I went to New Zealand and played with the Maori tribe. I went to South Africa, to Soweto, and played with a few tribes there; I went to Kenya and played with the Masai tribe in Nairobi; I went to Cuba and got some timbale drums from some of the elders there.…And when I say ‘got drums’, I mean I’ve recorded drums with either tribe-based societies or groups that were highly recommended to me. I pay them for their time, and I get to own the recordings. So those drums from all over the world will be the foundation of what this album is about.”

So far, the drums have been telling her that the world is ready for change, although how that will be reflected in her lyrics remains to be seen. “We’re impatient, almost, for some sort of release,” Badu says. “That’s what the drums feel like from all of these places I’ve been. It’s not quite a celebration; it’s more laborious than that. But it feels good!”

Erykah Badu plays the Orpheum on Tuesday (June 23) as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.