Eliane Elias
‘Time and Again’
Candid Records

Over the years, the piano has assumed a leading role not just in North American jazz, but in the improvised musics that have originated all over the New World and across the lands of the African Diaspora. 

In addition to flourishing at the hands of the great American jazz men born between the 19th century (Jelly Roll Morton) and the 21st (Joey Alexander), the piano has come to represent the jazz of Jamaica (Monty Alexander), Cuba (Chucho Valdés), and Panama (Danilo Pérez). Also, it’s the instrument of numerous New York-based Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican stylists (Eddie Palmieri, Arturo O’Farrill) and even some from mother Africa herself (Abdullah Ibrahim and Boki Dyani).

Born at São Paulo in 1960, Eliane Elias — who has a new album and a 10-show run this week at Birdland — is as fine a representative of Brazilian piano jazz as her country has ever produced. Like Monty Alexander in particular, she is a gifted bandleader and entertainer as well as a keyboard virtuoso. More than her contemporaries listed above, she is also a singer of note, working in the soft, understated Brazilian idiom popularized by both Jaoa Gilberto and Astrid Gilberto.

Ms. Elias also has tangible connections, both real and spiritual, with celebrated American jazzmen like arranger-composer Bob Brookmeyer, who collaborated with her on the classic album “Impulsive!” 25 years ago; Chet Baker, whose influence on the Brazilian singers of her generation is profound and immeasurable; and Bill Evans, whose flexible modal style proved to be surprisingly compatible with pianists working in Latin Jazz and Afro-Cuban idioms. 

Ms. Elias has recorded songbook tribute albums to the latter two, namely “I Thought About You” (2013) in honor of Baker, and “Something for You: Eliane Elias Sings & Plays Bill Evans” (2007). Indeed, she continues to honor Evans’s legacy by working on a permanent basis with his last great bassist, Mark Johnson, who is also her husband.

Her new album, a set of fresh originals titled “Time and Again,” has a heavy pop sheen to it. Most tracks include an unobtrusive, understated background choir of voices, arranged and performed by Take 6’s Mark Kibble, while “Sempre” was composed by Ms. Elias as a duet for herself and a 75-year-old Brazilian star, Djavan. “How Many Times” has a haunting, Asiatic kind of a tune enhanced by the master of guitar soundscapes, Bill Frisell, working with Ms. Elias for the first time, as far as I can tell.  

Appearing at Birdland with Mr. Johnson plus guitar and drums, she played a pleasing mix of originals, new works, and all-time Latin jazz standards, going back all the way back to 1939 for Ary Barroso’s “​​Aquarela do Brasil,” known outside of that country as simply “Brazil,” as well as two of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s breakthrough early works, “A Felicidade (Happiness)” and “Desifinado.”  

Where the album has a lilting, ambient quality to it — reminiscent of the electronically based smooth Brazilian jazz of Ivan Lins — her quartet performances at Birdland hone much more closer to mainstream American modern jazz.  

She concluded the early show on Wednesday with a grandly extended “Desafinado,” one of the earliest Jobim tunes to cause a stir outside of Brazil — even before the blockbuster breakthrough of “The Girl from Ipanema.” To non-jazz fans, the idea of a 10- or 12-minute treatment of a standard might seem self-indulgent in the extreme, but this was hardly the case here.  Ms. Elias played Jobim’s melody with an intensity that was boppish, Brazilian, and brilliant, allowing for extended solos from everyone, all of whom had something to say.  

Yet it’s never so intense as to be anything other than cheerful and uplifting; as the set ended, everyone at Birdland was smiling.