Alexa Weber Morales was born to a musical family in Berkeley, California....

Alexa Weber Morales was born to a musical family in Berkeley, California. Her father was a stay-at-home novelist and freelance writer who loved piano rags; her mother, a university administrator and aspiring vocalist. They placed an emphasis on language from early on. “Partially due to our heritage, and to their taste for well-aged wine ,” Weber Morales laughs, “my parents started the Ecole Bilingue in Berkeley, where my two brothers and I learned French. We also lived in France briefly after my parents got divorced.”

Growing up, she alternated weeks staying on her father's sailboat in the Berkeley Marina, her ex-stepmother's artist commune, and her mother's place. She began classical piano lessons at five and sang her first solo at eight at Malcolm X Elementary, during a performance with Bobby McFerrin . “ Dick Whittington [legendary jazz pianist and music educator] was my teacher. He liked my husky alto, but when I studied classical voice later on, they called me a high soprano.

“I've been singing as long as I can remember. I can sing an aria and sight-read, but my voice is contemporary. As with everything in my life, there's a broad range: I'm drawn to the street and the intellectual, the refined and the folk.”

During her final fling with academia, Weber Morales studied languages at Bryn Mawr College. Desperate for music, however, she performed in cabaret and theater, and listened to k.d. lang . She left college in her sophomore year and took several months to drive cross-country, playing Take 6 , the Gypsy Kings , and the soundtrack to the movie Bagdad Café all the way. One evening, sitting alone on top of a green hill in South Texas, she wrote her first song.

Back in the Bay Area, Weber Morales worked as an apprentice carpenter for a salty storyteller, an auto mechanic for a saucy old Hungarian, a roofer for a randy New Englander, a translator for a crazy government agent, and a freelance writer for a frazzled magazine editor. She also delivered singing telegrams, sang on boats and in malls, performed at Renaissance Faires and cafés, soloed with chamber choirs and at Grace Cathedral, and fronted big bands. While she continued her independent music studies, she worked her way up through the Bay Area music scene:

“It's been a long road, but I'm so lucky to have played with Carlos Federico and studied with Ed Kelly , just to name two of many heroes. It seems like you're not making any headway, and then you look back and see that those first lessons with Faith Winthrop and Macatee Hollie , those kind words I received from Madeline Eastman or Mark Murphy or Nancy Wilson —there are hundreds of milestones like that on a path that has led to this pretty cool place where I am today.”

It did take years, however, to find a way to reconcile making money and making music. “I married young, and my husband told me that music is a nice hobby, but it will never be some-thing big. I told him we'd get married on two conditions: I'd have a lot of animals and eventually, I was going to make it as a singer.” Her husband was a recent immigrant who came equipped with his own Mexican cultural force-field, resulting in plenty of clashes for the newlyweds.

The insider perspective on Latin America had its positives, though, helping Alexa land a job editing a Spanish-language magazine. When the company decided to launch a Brazilian edition, she taught herself Portuguese by memorizing singer Gal Costa 's repertoire. She honed her Portuguese during several trips to Brazil, where she was often mistaken for a Carioca, or Rio native. Subsequently she traveled to Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, and Cuba.

It was in 1999, during class at Jazz Camp West taught by Wayne Wallace , that she began to understand that not only her singing voice but her songs were viable. “Wayne respected me as a musician and songwriter,” says Weber Morales. “He has wide-ranging interests and can approach a song melodically, or groove-wise, or as a lyric or a concept. I have a lot of words in my head and he has a lot of notes in his, so it works out well.”

A mother of two young boys, Alexa began preproduction on Vagabundeo while pregnant with her second child and maintained demanding recording and gigging schedules just weeks after giving birth. She once struggled with balancing art and commerce; now her priorities are motherhood and music. “I was laid off from my magazine job when I was pregnant in December 2005. Everyone wonders when to quit their day job. In my case, it quit me. Now I'm applying everything I learned from ten years in that creative business to my full-time focus as a musician.”

It appears the timing couldn't have been better. Wallace produced her first album, Jazzmérica , an eclectic brew of salsa, jazz, and Brazilian influences. Despite the fact that she had no promotion budget, Jazzmérica slowly built a buzz. Rave local and national reviews led to airplay across the nation. Its success led to profiles on such syndicated radio programs as “Listen Here” and the BBC's “Have Your Say”; guest performances with the Reno Jazz Orchestra; working with Wallace as a Monterey Jazz Festival Latin Jazz Clinician; and contributing lead vocals to The Reckless Search for Beauty (Patois Records, 2007), Wallace's latest release. Their successful collaboration continues on Vagabundeo , another exciting step in the lifelong musical journey of Alexa Weber Morales.