Claudia Acuña didn't come up through the usual jazz vocalist route. She grew up in Santiago listening to Chilean folk singers and pop records, moved to New York in 1995 with almost nothing, and started working her way into the city's jam sessions by sheer persistence. Within a few years she was singing alongside musicians like Jason Lindner and John Benitez, and by 2000 she had a record deal with Verve for her debut, Wind from the South (2000).

What she brought to that scene was a sound that didn't sit neatly in either box people wanted to put her in. She wasn't a straight bossa-nova singer, and she wasn't doing the standard Great American Songbook thing either. Her phrasing has the cadence of Chilean folk song underneath it, even when she's singing a jazz standard — there's a weight and a directness to how she delivers a lyric that comes from somewhere other than Tin Pan Alley.

Her records with Verve, Wind from the South (2000) and Rhythm of Life (2002), built her reputation as someone who could hold her own in serious company without losing the folk roots that make her distinctive. She wasn't chasing crossover appeal or trying to soften her accent or her material to fit an American pop idea of what a Latin singer should sound like. If anything the records got more personal and more political as she went on — by the time of En Este Momento (2014) she was writing and choosing songs that spoke directly to Chile's history, including the Pinochet years, which is not a small thing for a singer based thousands of miles from home to keep returning to.

If you're coming to her for the first time, don't expect fireworks or vocal gymnastics. Acuña sings with restraint — she trusts a melody to do its work and doesn't oversell a phrase. That can make her records feel quiet at first next to flashier singers, but stick with one all the way through and the control starts to sound like confidence rather than caution. She's spent three decades in New York without ever losing the thread back to Santiago, and that tension, between where she sings and where she's from, is basically the whole story.