Out of the Spin Cycle : Nnenna Freelon felt trapped, drowning in diapers, until she discovered jazz and claimed a voice that has taken her way past the laundry cart.

It was all the diapers that did it.

Nnenna Freelon was at home in North Carolina in 1983 minding her three small children when she realized: This is it. Laundry, Pop-Tarts, TV. This is all I’ll know.

Her world closing in and her architect husband at work, she grew angry, even bitter. She’d grown up, after all, with so many gifts: a church choir singing voice, the looks of a model and brains that would take her through college and a promising career in hospital administration.

She asked herself: “What can I do to get beyond the toddlers? What can I do to keep myself alive?”

Return to the local hospital? No.

Pursue a graduate degree in the University of North Carolina program to which she’d previously been admitted? No.

Jazz music. Yes: Jazz.

Not that Nnenna Freelon really knew anything about jazz.

“I saw an ad for a six-week workshop run by my local arts council here in Durham,” she says in a telephone interview. “I went. I took Pierce, my son, along every Wednesday night, and it turned out I lived for those Wednesday nights. I was a thirsty flower soaking up all this new energy.”

There can be little question that back then, in her late 20s in 1983, Nnenna Freelon was just waiting to happen, though it wouldn’t be overnight.

Her first CD, titled “Nnenna Freelon,” was released in 1992 and earned a Grammy nomination, largely on the strength of her stunning vocal rendition and string arrangement of “Stella by Starlight.” This was followed a year later by a spare trio-backed CD titled “Heritage,” a collection of classic ballads from the jazz songbook with classic piano stylings by Kenny Barron.

Then, last summer, for her third Columbia-label outing, Freelon finally got her way, finally got her laundry-room prayer answered: a CD of her original songs titled “Listen.”

The jazz world has. So, too, will Los Angeles fans starting Tuesday, when she opens a six-night engagement at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood. Freelon’s agile vocal placements, warmed subtly by a blues inflection but rendered formally by ultra-precise enunciation of lyrics, are at once classic and modern, warm and cool, intimate and reflective. Her original songs, in particular, bear the considerable force of her life concerns, chief among them the ability to stick to one’s convictions and weave threads of everyday wishes into a single, guiding dream.

Freelon is very happy about this turn of events in her life. So is her husband, Phil, whom she credits with bluntly challenging her to rise to her 1983 anger and find a way out.

“My marriage was at stake. My life was at stake,” Freelon says. “I was charged with negative energy, being eaten alive by it, and here was Phil saying: ‘You can’t use the kids or the family as an excuse. You have choices. Find them.’ ”

She pauses.

“Of course, at the time, I didn’t hear that as support. I heard it as someone telling a drowning person, ‘Hey, swim ashore.’ ”

*

It would be wrong to suggest that Nnenna Freelon picked a jazz career from the Yellow Pages, took a few lessons and hopped onstage. Jazz music does not work that way. Freelon, who once listened happily to War and Chicago and confesses that “I did not have ears enough to understand Betty Carter at all,” is the first to say so.

But music was always in her childhood home in Cambridge, Mass. Her father, a TV repairman from North Carolina, and mother, a beautician from Texarkana, Tex., “brought their country traditions and sense of community with them, and so I sang in the church,” Freelon says.

Young Nnenna’s voice immediately stood out. The word gift was bantered about when she’d sing.

Still, in the black Southern sensibility of her home, such gifts were viewed, Freelon says, as “community property, as something that doesn’t belong to you.” Neighbors and church members would ask for Nnenna’s singing at special affairs, and her parents always disallowed payment to her for something “you honor as a service to the community.”

Growing up thus had its dualities for Freelon, raised with rural Southern values amid America’s oldest New England academic community. She would attend Simmons College in Boston before heading south to North Carolina for graduate school.

Now, her ancestral North Carolina feels like home, or “where I’m from,” Freelon says.

But it was back in the Cambridge house that her father had played classic jazz recordings of Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington and others. Freelon ignored those recordings in favor of pop music.

On her first Wednesday night at the Durham jazz workshop, however, Freelon found she knew the chord changes to the jazz standards being played--a fact that both delighted and haunted her.

“I called my dad and asked, ‘How come I know this music?’ ” she recalls. “And he says, ‘Because it was in your face all along.’ ”

The discovery of such complete aural memory--the ear’s analogue to photographic memory--helps explain Freelon’s successful and rare adulthood dive into a music that is complex and demanding both emotionally and intellectually.

T he revelation only served to inspire her. She’d leave her house to spend hours at a Durham record store whose proprietor “turned me on to Dakota Staton, Jill Clayton, DeeDee Bridgewater, Chris Connor, Abby Lincoln--all these women who were so amazing,” Freelon says. The education--listening for phrasing, musical conception, storytelling quality, emotional point of view--was invaluable.

“Ten years ago, it’s true,” she says, “I did not have ears for the likes of Betty Carter. I would have said, ‘She’s singing under the note. Why is she doing that?’ ”

The answer to that question, ironically, is precisely why Freelon found her life’s reprieve in jazz music: freedom, or the ability to make musical decisions that vividly express sensibility.

“I’m given permission in jazz that I don’t get elsewhere,” she says. “The music allows spontaneity. Once you know a tune you can bend it, and that is empowering. So I feel powerful when I’m singing. I feel more feminine. I feel more alive. I feel more beautiful. Naturally, one wants that.

“In a sense, this music gives me the greatest degree of ‘ This is Nnenna. ‘ And that’s saved my life. My marriage. My role as a mother. That’s what singing this music has done for me.”

She pauses again.

“Jazz is life--it’s serious business. Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, they sang for survival, they sang to tell us how they lived in this world.

“Nobody sees the world as I see it as a young black mother. I feel I have a story to tell.”

*

Be careful how you cast your circle You’ll meet your shadow coming ‘round again You never can escape the circle This is a journey that will never end --From “Circle Song,” by Nnenna Freelon

Scatting is the habit of every jazz singer. While Nnenna Freelon handles the improvisational deed with deftness and authority, she keeps it to a bare minimum. Words do the mule work in her songs. Words forge the stories she sings. Perhaps more than any other jazz singer of her generation, she depends upon words to communicate her core message.

“It’s direct,” she says. “Whole stories built from words can do what I care about most: give power and hope to people.”

As a result her songbook is a mix of evocative, soul-stirring standards such as Wayne Shorter’s angular “Infant Eyes” and her own pointed writings such as “Circle Song” and “Listen,” whose lyrical and musical values draw power from blunt juxtapositions:

Break the arm / But the grip remains; Blind the eye / But the vision’s unchanged; Still the voice / But never the dream; Silence the cry / Listen for the scream.

Somehow, Freelon trades on such interiors with a bright musical polish that defies what are at times darkly existential concerns. Even so, her songs are never conventionally pretty or glossed in love talk.

“It’s a bit late in the day,” she says wryly, “to be singing la-de-da songs.”

But lyrics transmute, depending upon the delivery.

Common words, by the texture and tone and enunciation lent to them, are made distinct and uncommon when sung--just as a C-sharp played by Sonny Rollins does not sound like the “same” C-sharp played by Branford Marsalis.

It is upon this principle that Freelon makes any song, original or standard, her own.

“You shade every tune with your life, and as that happens the meaning of the words changes,” she says.

“I’m in an emotional place when I sing. Musically I’m not thinking about how to navigate--I’m not thinking, ‘Oh, God, here comes that C-7th.’ I’m thinking about the words and what they say and how to say them.

“So I’m not really talking about what the Shirelles are talking about if I sing one of their songs. And I’m not talking about what Carole King is talking about if I sing, ‘Will you still love me tomorrow?’

“What I’m talking about is me.

“I’m singing what I sing as a mother, wife, lover, daughter, sister.”

Freedom. Nnenna Freelon final ly has her freedom, if you can call her booked life free.

Jazz, her savior, is now her life study, her Grail. Her children are older--14, 12 and 11--and she finds that her time with them, often chiseled away by touring, is more important than ever and compressed when it does occur. In between, she schemes to find the time to write songs, for mining the right words is the artistic struggle she has made most important.

As a result, Freelon’s life today is far more demanding than it was in the diaper era.

“Music claimed me,” she says. “I had to do it, plain and simple. It’s what I was put here to do.”

While a 10-year devotion to jazz might be considered embryonic at best, Freelon has her sights set far ahead. Already she’s worried about the death of jazz music:

“I am afraid that young people have no connection to this music. And I don’t want to be the last person singing it, singing dinosaur music.

“So while I’ll always perform it, I feel that I may be headed to teaching it as well, to keep it going.”

Freelon considers again the power she feels from understanding a tune so well she that can alter or “bend it” to suit her purposes.

“Today’s kids are consumers,” she says. “They’re not making or taking charge of anything. They watch TV, hang out. That’s not active, that’s not creative. It’s all so powerless. I feel that I can be a model in this sense, that I can make a difference.”

That would seem entirely in character for a former hospital administrator who got frustrated by the limits of her household world--and perfectly in character for a Cambridge, Mass., girl who came of womanly and artistic age in the American South of her parents, a South resonant in the blues roots of jazz itself.