Karrin Allyson: Tonight Through Sunday at Catalina

Singer Karrin Allyson returns to the Southland tonight with a four-evening engagement at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood. She's supporting her new album, "Imagina: Songs of Brasil," her strongest collection of songs since the one-two punch of "Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane" and "In Blue" from 2001-2002.

Allyson has mined this territory before, most notably with her 1999 album, "From Paris To Rio," but "Imagina" demonstrates just how much she has grown as a vocalist in the intervening years. Singing in Portuguese and English, she nails both the melancholy and playfulness of the lyrics in a collection that digs deep in the catalogs of Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. And, yes, she can still scat like there's no tomorrow.