Ingrid Lucia had the perfect training for a career as an itinerant musician. Her father, Poppa Neutrino (a.k.a. David Pearlman), is a San Francisco Beat who took his brood to New Orleans in the early '70s, where they formed a family band, the Flying Neutrinos, and survived by busking on the street and living off the grid, camping out in cars, cemeteries and homemade rafts built from refuse.
In the early '90s, when Poppa N. decided to devote himself full time to raft building, Lucia adopted the family band moniker and turned it into a raucous vehicle for her expansive repertoire of original tunes, New Orleans jazz standards and Crescent City rhythm and blues.
"My dad's always enthusiastic, and believes that you could do anything from scratch. That was his example to all the kids," says Lucia, who performs around the region in a variety of contexts over the next two weeks, her first Bay Area performances since her 1999 San Francisco debut. "We spent 10 years playing on the streets of New Orleans and then my dad says, 'We're ready for the big time!' So we went and played in the subways of New York City. It was a hands-on beginning."
Her on-the-job training turned Lucia into a polished performer steeped in the lore and grooves of her hometown. After recording three albums and touring internationally with the Flying Neutrinos, she decided to return to New Orleans and started performing under her own name.
She's so identified with the city that she was chosen to represent New Orleans in an extensive ad campaign launched by the Bureau of Tourism.
For her performance at Jazz at Pearl's (she returns to the North Beach club tonight), she'll be focusing on New Orleans standards, songs she's been singing since she was a tot.
"We're doing traditional jazz and rhythm and blues tunes, some dirges and second lines," Lucia says. "I like to do songs that aren't overdone, but people want to hear 'Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?,' so I've got to do that as well."
Lucia is also part of a concept program, "Crazy for Patsy Cline," at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on Friday and Cafe Du Nord on Sunday.
Joining forces with Bay Area singers Lavay Smith and Carmen Getit, she'll be bringing a jazz and blues sensibility to songs made famous by the country music legend, who died in a plane crash at the age of 30 in 1963.
While Lucia's voice is often compared to Billie Holiday's, she says that Cline is her primary influence. "I always get requests for her tunes, but I'm hesitant to sing them because you can't do them any better than she did," Lucia says. "For these shows, however, we'll be reinventing each piece, finding a different feel for every tune. There'll be three girl singers bouncing off each other, having a lot of fun with some great songs that people don't associate with jazz."
