Jazz singer Brenda Lewis’ rediscovery of her voice while she was teaching English in post-Communist Czechoslovakia led to her becoming a professional singer in her late 20s.

Singing has always come easy to Lewis, who has two critically acclaimed albums to her credit and performs at top jazz clubs and music festivals across Ontario.

Lewis picks up melodies quickly and, as a young teen, could mimic the voices of Cher, Karen Carpenter and Marie Osmond. For a while, she sang backup in a reggae band, but she said she never dreamed she’d get up on stage and sing lead.

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Teaching in Czechoslovakia in 1990, she brought lyrics of folk songs to class for her students to sing, and while singing along with them, she rediscovered her  own voice.

“It was a very safe way of getting into singing,” she said. In Czechoslovakia and then in Guelph, Ont., where she’s currently based, friends asked her to sing at parties and, encouraged by the positive response, she began performing on open stages and in local clubs.  Lewis started out singing folk music and country blues and then made the transition to jazz.

“I’ve always kept a slightly roots element to what I do, also a bit of an undertone that comes from gospel and soul,” she said. Lewis is a publicist who promotes her own music and said her profile as an artist has helped her grow her public relations business. With her latest release, Far and Near, a collection of standards and songs written by Canadian artists, Lewis takes the listener on a journey.

“I started putting songs together for the album, and once I got halfway through, I realized I had a theme. A lot of them were about faraway places, longing or places of the heart. It’s all about travel, one way or the other,” Lewis said.

Far and Near features several songs outside the jazz genre, written by Sarah McLachlan, Gil Scott-Heron and Jesse Winchester. Guitarist Margaret Stowe, who co-produced the CD with Lewis, reinterprets the songs in a jazz vein.  One of the standards on the CD is A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, a song Lewis dedicates to her parents when she performs it. Lewis said she imagines her parents, Henry and Edith, who were both veterans of the British army, dancing to it. “It’s about London, England. That’s where they lived after the war, when they got married,” she said.

Lewis’ father, born Heinz Laufer, was, at 14, one of 669 Jewish children evacuated from Czechoslovakia and sent to  England in 1939 on the Czech Kindertransport organized by Sir Nicholas Winton. In 2009, Lewis met Sir Nicholas and thanked him for saving her father’s life.

“It’s a moment when you realize he’s a just a man, of course, but a man who made a decision to do something extraordinary,” she said. Lewis said it was a matter of sheer luck that her dad was chosen for the Kindertransport.

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“Everyone applied to get their kids onto this Kindertransport. My grandparents applied for both of their kids to be sent and the agency that was in charge picked my dad, probably because he spoke English.”

The rest of her father’s family didn’t fare so well. His mother, his father and his brother perished. Lewis believes in paying her dad’s good fortune forward. Late last year, after struggling with what she could do to help the Syrian refugees, she co-presented and performed at a benefit concert for them in Elora, Ont.

Lewis is performing at 7 p.m. on May 15 at Toronto’s Jazz Bistro. For more information about Lewis, click here. You can download Far and Near on iTunes.