A word of advice to those who spend time with singer Paula Jeanine in public: prepare to be noticed. Jeanine is a tall woman and today she's decked in a long suede jacket, matching leopard-skin gloves and a broad black hat. Moreover, she has a tendency to do something normally confined to stars in Bollywood movies and Broadway shows, namely breaking into song at the drop of a hat , be it on the streets of New York, in the aisles of a music store or over a cup of coffee.
    ”Kuch door hamare saath,” she croons as she briefly channels Asha Bhosle, seemingly oblivious to the many heads turning in her direction.

We're flipping through CDs at a Barnes & Noble, darting from jazz to soul to standard to pop and then to the international section with its depressingly thin selection of Indian albums. Jeanine's influences are all over the chart and she mock cringes as she snaps up one must-buy after another.
     “Ooh, I'm going to get this,” she says. It's a collection of Pablo Neruda poems, sung by Luciana Souza. “There's something about the immensity of the emotion,” she says of Neruda, “and he writes about loss. You can really put your finger on it."

She switches to jazz, reciting composer Billy Strayhorn from memory.
     “ I thought for a while that your poignant smile was filled with the sadness of a great love for me,” she says, softly, “ Oh, I was wrong. Again I was wrong.” " That's ghazal , “she laughs. “ That's ghazal.”

Indeed, it is a bit incongruous to hear such comments from someone who has been to India all of one time, but Jeanine is confident she's found her calling, or that it's found her. After going the straight jazz route for years, the New Yorker was at a Pakistani store in Coney Island, looking for something new.
     “The guy said to me, ‘Are you interested in ghazal?' and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,'” she said with a laugh.

The disc was by Farida Khanum, and one ghazal in particular struck her. From then on, she sank headlong into the form, skin tone be damned. Like the work of Neruda and other Western poets, she found the ghazal capable of expressing the big feelings- the sorrow and longing of life- that had always been central to her art . Ghazal masters like Ghalib and Hafiz became her new inspirations, writers from another language, and another century, no doubt, but people who charted the same emotional terrain, who drank the same wine, who understood, as she did, how it felt to lose one's heart.

At the end of 2001, Jeanine moved to Mumbai for five months. Five nights a week, she moonlit as her Western self, playing congas at the Oberoi Towers (now called the Hilton Towers) to appreciative crowds. But in the daytime, as part of a program run by the Jazz-India Vocal Institute, she studied Hindustani vocals under Dhanashree Pandit-Rai, and Carnatic under Vidwan Shri T S Nandakumar.
     “I entered the secret world of Indian classical music,” she said. “You've got to really quiet your mind to get into it. It's not like you can just put on some background music”- she shakes her hips, a la Britney Spears- “and get into it. You have to really quite your mind. I love being an American, but I think that's not one of our strongest points.”

While she was there, she initiated a project that would come to be called American Ghazal, employing the literary themes and vocal styling of Indian music, but in English and with contemporary jazz accompaniment (her husband, jazz pianist Richard Bennett, is a primary collaborator). For lack of a better word, Jeanine's music can be termed fusion, but unlike many previous efforts under that rubric, there is not the same cut-and-paste quality that has made many East-West collaborations seem sophomoric or forced. Although the Indian influences are clearly discernable, at her finest moments they feel fully absorbed and, like all good music, inevitable.

As of now, American Ghazal encompasses about 22 works, but Jeanine is still searching for the right label and the right producer. Someone like Peter Gabriel, whose company declined, or Hariharan, whom she greatly admires and thinks would understand how to make it work.

Jeanine was raised in Cleveland. Her mother, June Evinger, was a former big band singer.
     “She's still a fine listener,” she said, “and she's trying to get into my new music.”

As a kid, Paula got some of her first lessons in music via an early version of karaoke, singing along to pop standard and unknowingly learning concepts of time and rhythm. But childhood wasn't all fun. She alludes to the difficulty of growing up under a very bad marriage, playing constant spectator to the fights between her mother and father. Last year, her father died, and just five weeks later, her mother suffered a heart attack. Not long after, Paula herself had a health scare, but managed to come out on top. In the 1980s, after she moved to the East Village, in New York, she saw up close what drug and alcohol abuse did to people around her.
     “When you live in a community of musicians, you see all kinds of things,” she says, elliptically.

As we stroll through the aisles of the music she goes through a list of singers and musicians she worships. Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, who did with horns what she wants to do with voices. Abida Parveen, whose big, open-throated sound she knows she'll never have (“I don't have the instrument”). Ghulam Ali and Medhi Hassan. We chance upon a CD by Carmen McRae, a late jazz singer heavily influenced by Billie Holliday and who, like the ravaged Holliday, had a way of pouring her heart into song.
     “Maybe when I'm 70, I'll sing like that,” said Jeanine, walking on. “I've had my share of pain and life.”