Claudia Acuna sings at Waterplace Park, in Providence, on Saturday night as part of SoundSession ’09.

On her latest disc, En Este Momento, the Chilean jazz singer Claudia Acuna blends jazz and Latin music in a way that accentuates the best of both. Instead of sambas and bossas with long solos over them, lush jazz forms get a Latin accent from Acuna’s singing, the acoustic guitar of Juancho Herrera and the gentle rhythm section of Omer Avital and Clarence Penn.

There’s a smooth sway to the odd time signature of “Te Recuerdo Amanda” (with lyrics by the Chilean poet Victor Jara), for example, and a bounce to “Sueno Contigo,” while the ballads allow Acuna’s gorgeous tone to come to the forefront, particularly on the hushed “Tulum” and the sparse “Contigo En La Distancia.” It’s joyous, romantic and substantial, and it stays with you a long time.

Acuna calls the new record “a recollection of songs that I grew up listening to in Spanish,” and she’s been recording progressively more in Spanish over the years (since her 2000 solo debut Wind From the South), to the point where En Este Momento has only one song in English. That’s a switch from what a lot of Latin singers do, but Acuna says that it was a conscious decision. She loved jazz standards and still does, but adds that “from the beginning, I’ve always promised myself that I was going to honor my roots and where I come from.” She recalls that Nat “King” Cole did a record in Spanish, which got her thinking, “If he can do that, I think I can, too!”

Acuna writes in both languages; the one English-language song on the new record is an original by her and longtime collaborator and pianist Jason Lindner. “I don’t really decide consciously” which language to write in, she says; “some songs come naturally in one language or another,” and can even change in midstream.

Acuna says that one of her great inspirations was seeing Dizzy Gillespie in 1991 in Chile with The United Nation Band. “He made a huge impact on me. I thought, ‘Wow, if he can embrace Afro-Cuban and Latin music like this, I’m sure I can play truly to who I am and where I come from.”

When Acuna was young, her parents didn’t agree with her decision to be a singer. She says they’re proud of her now. “And sometimes I think they feel a little bad about the hard time they gave me … but I can imagine that they were doing what, in their eyes, they thought was best for me.…

“And the generation that they come from and the culture that they come from, they could not understand — ‘where is this animal coming from? She wants to be a musician! Where is she from?’ ”

She adds that it could have been a blessing in disguise. “Maybe if they didn’t give me such a hard time, maybe I wouldn’t have the tools and the desire and stubbornness to fight for what I want. Maybe they were my first lesson in life: to fight for what I want.”

When she got to New York in 1995, after her first-ever airplane trip, she says, she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a Latin singer, so she put her love of American standards to work in the clubs at jam sessions and after-hours meet-ups. “As soon as people saw that I could sing and was a good musician and a good listener and didn’t have an attitude, the doors were open.”

She soon met people such as Wynton Marsalis and Danilo Perez, and made guest appearances on records by George Benson, Avishai Cohen, Arturo O’Farrill and more. She was able to find plenty of collaborators, “which is that beauty of New York, if you’re a musician and a music lover.”

Acuna says that she hopes, even with her solo career, to make more guest appearances in the future. “When I collaborate with someone, not only do I get exposure to an audience that maybe did not know who I was, but also the experience of collaborating with someone who might open you to another direction that I might never have thought of.”

But for now, there’s her own record and tour to look after. And it seems as though the blending of a Latin vocal lushness with a jazz sensibility has taken off. “I like the idea of that blending.… I’ve been able to make it sound and look fun and natural. And that’s the beauty of it to me.”

Claudia Acuna sings at Waterplace Park, in Providence, on Saturday night as part of SoundSession ’09. The bill includes Los Sugar Kings, Alyssa Graham and Edwin Pabon, and the show starts at 5 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call (401) 351-0353, and for a full schedule of the week’s events, go to providencesoundsession.com.

rmassimo@projo.com