So many Latin jazz vocalists populate the planet, and so few sing in Portland. But PDX Jazz mixed it up early this month, and we got lucky Oct. 1 when Mexican jazz singer Magos Herrera and Brazilian guitarist Vinicius Gomes performed for two hours at The Old Church.

That’s a long gig. The duo’s energy and south-of-the-border soul never flagged.

Herrera, who is 53 and a seasoned international performer, is many things aside from a singer. She’s a composer, a producer, a spokeswoman for gender equality and preventing violence against women, a Grammy nominee, and a teacher in New York City’s Mannes School of Music and The New School. She has produced 13 albums, and sang primarily at this concert from her last three – 2018’s Dreamers, 2020’s Con Alma and 2023’s Aire.

Here and there we’ve been graced in Portland by visits from formidable Latin jazz singers such as Brazil’s Luciana Souza and Eliane Elias in recent years, and of course we are blessed to have Portlanders Jessie Marquez and Virginia Lopez. And let us not forget the highly touted headliner Bebel Gilberto, daughter of Bossa Nova giant Joao Gilberto. She was a disappointment at the PDX Jazz Festival a few years ago, strutting around the stage, her mike falling out of her back pocket (rumored to have been stoned, drunk or something else).

But Herrera, who is 53, made up for all that. She has a flexible big-ranged voice – shall we say sublime – that has inspired writers to compare her to such great communicators as Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, singers who could touch hearts and jerk tears. Herrera doesn’t imitate or embody either; she fully possesses her own original voice, her own person, her own presentation. When she walked out on the church’s “stage,” wraithe-thin in a long black robe-like dress with cobwebby bat wings that allowed her to move her arms every which way (but not too dramatically), silver bracelets on her wrists, her hair in a topknot, her strong bones a counterweight to her bold voice, you just understood, plain and simple: She is an artist. She could scat, she could yelp, she skillfully could phrase the mood of any song, she could improvise, she could embrace spiritual ideas without soaking them with sap or exaggeration, and even if you didn’t understand a word of what she was singing, she sang right to you. No matter what she vocalized, she and Gomes ended each song decisively and cleanly together, usually exchanging a sly smile. These two have played together for a while. There was respect and chemistry between them, and each deserved the lengthy applause they earned after two hours.

Some call Herrera’s voice smoky, others say it’s sultry, and I call it utterly mesmerizing. The half-full TOC audience (the church holds 300) was transfixed as she worked her way through songs in Portuguese, Spanish and English with guitarist Gomes, part of her regular trio. For percussion, Herrera tapped her silver rings on her microphone and used an obscure tambourine-shaped instrument with keys that she picked up at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Ariz. when she was performing there.

Some of her tunes came from her 2018 album Dreamers, with Brooklyn Rider, her favorite chamber quartet, she said. One of its cuts, “Nina,” was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Arrangement category and climbed high on such charts as Billboard Classical, New York Times and National Public Radio. She sang several from her 2023 most recent album, Aire, which she explained celebrated healing and humanity, and from Con Alma (“With Soul,” based on a Dizzy Gillespie standard) and an album she made during Covid that speaks to finding communion and community in isolation. Her piece, “Calling,” was beautiful and touching, and I saw tears spilling down cheeks around the church.

From “Choro de Lua,” the opener roughly translated from Portuguese as “Cry of the Moon,” to “Gracias a la Vida” (all the small things we can be grateful for) to “Passarinhaderia” (a tune about a bird that she asked the audience to sing with her) to “The Healer” from her latest album, grace, surprise and variety colored the evening’s music. What a shame not more people turned up to hear Herrera and Gomes.