Northern California’s Bay Area has long been one of the world’s most fertile cultural melting pots. For decades, disparate traditions and ethnicities have met and mixed there, producing stand-alone new hybrids. Its all-embracing music scene has fueled the development of distinct genres and world-class artists, as the examples of Carlos Santana and Azteca, among many others, strikingly illustrate. With the debut recording of her Sephardic Music Experience, vocalist Kat Parra makes a strong case for her inclusion in the Bay Area’s pantheon of globally noteworthy music innovators.

Dos Amantes (Two Lovers) is a 10-track session that successfully marries such touchstone Latin jazz styles as the Cuban rumba, Peruvian lando and Spanish flamenco with themes related to the Jewish culture that once flourished over much of the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. Producer Wayne Wallace, a trombonist and West Coast Latin-jazz legend, wisely steers the session away from the kind of bold and brassy arrangements for which he is noted toward a more rhythmically airy and orchestrally-nuanced sound. The tight harmonies produced by Masaru Koga’s flutes and Lila Sklar’s violin prove to be the perfect way to introduce and sustain the Middle Eastern-rooted air that elicits the Sephardic spirit. For an additional touch of authenticity, Wallace features the eight-member choir of Oakland’s Temple Sinai on one track. Parra’s quest for stylistic purity leads her to perform several of the traditional songs in the Ladino dialect, an ancient tongue grounded in centuries-old Castilian Spanish that includes Jewish, Turkish and Arabic words.

With a commanding voice that’s as warming as a shot of Spanish brandy, Parra injects equal amounts of passion and spirituality into these captivating themes as she delineates one of the most propitious variants of Latin jazz to come along in years.