Marta Topferova

How exactly does a Czech-born singer with the lissome bearing of a supermodel and a penchant for guitar-strumming coffeehouse folk find herself as an interpreter of pan-American music styles? To hear Marta Topferova—whose new album, La Marea, nods to tango and bossa nova as well as the homegrown musics of Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba—is to gain a sense of the new world order.

Topferova, who moved to Seattle as a teenager, picked up Spanish from her Latino high school social circle, studied music at Bard College, and then immersed herself in travels through South America, the Caribbean and Spain. Singing her own lyrics in Spanish and accompanying herself on a Venezuelan cuatro (a guitarlike instrument introduced by the Spanish colonizers), Topferova evokes the melancholy longing and tragic poetry of the cultures that inspired her. It's all quite seamless—so much so that it's easy to assume she was raised in Buenos Aires or Santiago de Cuba instead of the cradle of grunge.

As pleasing as La Marea is, with its Lorca-like romantic airs and passport stamped with rhythms, it's Topferova's concerts that are quietly astonishing. Her minimal combo features only a drummer and a harpist, but the latter—Colombian virtuoso Edmar Castaneda—will redefine your understanding of the stringed instrument. He nearly becomes a one-man band, plucking bass lines almost invisibly while picking out melodies that shimmer as surely as all that liquid moonlight Topferova loves to sing about.—Steve Dollar