A glorious voice, a glorious spirit

Tania Libertad sounds like a terrific stage name, one that rings of female strength and freedom.

But this is the actual given name of a diminutive Peruvian chanteuse who has survived more than three decades in the music business only to hit a new peak this year with her 33rd album, “Costa Negra,” a beautiful, contemporary collection of Afro-Peruvian music that has brought her acclaim and wider audiences in world music circles.

It’s been a long, circuitous road for Tania Libertad de Souza Zuniga, who made a rare local appearance with an understated but often stunning performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday night. She was born a poor white girl in a forlorn outpost of northern Peru populated primarily by descendants of African slaves. But she commands the stage with a regal demeanor, a gloriously gifted voice and a soaring spirit that lives up to the name with which she was christened.

“My parents put a great responsibility on my shoulders [with that name], and I didn’t have any choice but to exercise it,” Tania jokes with a husky laugh during an interview in Spanish on the eve of her show.

The only girl in a family of seven brothers, she sometimes exercised her personal liberty, to her parents’ chagrin.

When she was a child, she recalls, her strict policeman father compelled her to serenade his various paramours with songs he had penned for them. “I wouldn’t have minded so much,” says Tania, “but the songs were truly terrible.”

To break what she considered her father’s macho stranglehold on her life and later her budding career, she left her native country in her 20s and started over in Mexico. It was the late ‘70s, the height of disco, but Tania Libertad carved out an independent path guided by her love of Latin American folklore, recording her first album of boleros long before the romantic classics were rediscovered.

“Leaving Peru was the most important decision I ever made,” says Tania, now a fit and youthful 51. “Because there came a time in my career when I was singing what everybody else wanted me to sing. What my father wanted, what my mother wanted, what they wanted on TV, what my country wanted. And I was feeling really miserable.

“I needed to be the master of my own decisions, of my own mistakes, of my own accomplishments. I needed to sing what I wanted to sing.”

Backed on Friday by a superb quintet of Peruvian and Mexican musicians, the singer offered 21 songs reflecting her pan-American musical passions -- the bolero, the Mexican ranchera, a taste of trova and, of course, the Afro-Peruvian styles on which she was raised.

Due to visa problems, her band was missing its Cuban-born musical director and pianist, Sonia Cornuchet. The absence forced Gabriela Garcia Rivas, who normally plays accordion and guitar, to perform double duty at the keyboard while juggling her other instruments like a one-woman band.

The handicap didn’t mar the performance. This group is entirely tailored to Tania’s vocals, playing with a lighter touch than Afro-Peruvian rhythms normally demand, almost gingerly at times. Guitarist Luis Felix Casaverde and bassist Jesus Mendoza added lovely but unobtrusive adornments. Percussionists Juan Carlos Vazquez and Marco Antonio Campos brought restrained power to congas and cajon, the typical Peruvian instrument shaped like a crate. The two tall drummers, dressed in colorful pajama-like costumes, also performed a humorous dance “competition,” with steps that resembled tap and soft shoe, during a delightful pantomimed skit.

Tania’s voice is a phenomenon, so pure, piercing and sustained at moments that it sounds otherworldly. With a range that runs from a high, ethereal warble to a throaty growl, she showed off her power occasionally by dropping her microphone and letting her unaided voice fill the hall.

As a genuine interpreter, she extracts the deepest feeling and meaning from her songs. This is most apparent in the unique, un-Mexican way she sings the traditional Mexican ranchera.

Mexicans are rowdier in their approach to abandonment and betrayal in their country tunes, such as Jose Alfredo Jimenez’s “Tu Recuerdo y Yo,” which has the singer in a cantina nursing heartbreak and a tequila. Mariachis handle the pain with such a cathartic gusto that we’re sure they’ll be fine in the morning, after a bowl of menudo.

But Tania wrung every ounce of desperation out of the melody. She drew out phrases and lingered over the hurt in each note, revealing the song’s wrenching existential desolation. It was so intense that we welcomed the comic relief when she announced she was moving on to lighter material “before we cut open our veins.” Tania finds it ironic that she had to become a “world music” artist to get noticed by American audiences, when she’s been living and working right next door for almost a quarter century. But she’s also been shunned by the mainstream Latin music industry here, because her style is considered noncommercial. Amazingly, “Costa Negra,” released by World Village, marks her domestic album debut in the United States.

It’s also her first full album of Afro-Peruvian music. It came about after Tania brought renowned Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora to perform in Mexico three years ago and met her manager, Jose da Silva. She told him of her dream to record with African musicians, taking Peru’s native music back to its roots.

By the end of that year, Tania was in Paris recording for the Lusafrica label with musicians from Senegal, Cameroon and Madagascar. She says the African musicians delighted in discovering the different cadence and syncopation of rhythms that had evolved over centuries among the offspring of slaves in the Americas.

“They were so excited that when the sessions were over they hugged us with joy,” recalls Tania. “They picked me up off the floor, along with my Peruvian percussionists, and carried us in circles around the studio.” She’s now working on a follow-up Lusafrica CD.

Alter the UCLA concert, Tania greeted a long line of fans backstage with hugs and kisses, patiently signing autographs and posing for pictures. Although happy with her success, she says she never wants to be a big star, because that kind of celebrity comes and goes.

“Pop fans are fickle,” concludes the singer, who is married with a teenage son. “They embrace one artist one day, and the next they’re embracing somebody else. I don’t want to capture that kind of public. I want to find an audience that will never leave me.”