Performing tomorrow at World Cafe Live under that singular name, the artist formerly known as Lisa Celeste Stroud is proudly making connections as the daughter of Nina Simone, the brilliant jazz-, soul- and gospel-rooted singer/pianist who came of age and came to embody racial pride and consciousness in the tumultuous 1960s.

For reasons ironic and all too typical, Nina Simone has grown in stature since her death in 2003. That smoky, dramatically charged voice riding atop elegantly hip and subtle piano phrasings seems always to be in the air. Her music has flavored many a car and clothing commercial and gets played relentlessly in clubs and stores.

Nina Simone also is selling well on disc, newly celebrated with an album of remixes and posthumous DVD concert-video releases.

Soon, her daughter will make the flames dance even higher with her tribute album, "Simone on Simone" (Koch), which celebrates a "personal favorites" crop of mom's songs with bristling, big-band jazz treatments - from the relatively obscure "Gal From Joe's" to signature classics such as "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," "Work Song" and "Feeling Good."

"We were hoping initially to get this out in February for Black History Month and also timed to the month that Mom was born" said the younger Simone, 45, in a chat from her home in Stroudsburg, Pa.

The game plan now is to set up the disc for an April 29 release with a club tour and some festival dates. Simone will be working the material here with a seven-piece band boasting three horns, guitar, piano and rhythm section.

"We definitely make it happen; but if you want to hear it with the full album charts, featuring 13 horns, you should come catch us at the Berks Jazz Festival [in Reading, Pa.] on March 29," she plugged.

While some second-generation vocalists (think Frank Sinatra Jr. or Enrique Iglesias) seem like slightly out-of-focus, vitamin-deprived replicates of their parental units, the second coming of Simone is actually a bigger, bolder singer than her mom ever was, even in her prime.

Yes, the younger Simone can connect artistically when she wants to with her elder, especially with the measured, word-by-word phrasing she puts on some songs. But this Simone comes into her own with surprisingly loud, proud and funkafied versions of tunes like "Black Is the Color," or her bravura, Broadway-baby styled "Love Me or Leave Me."

The latter should not be a surprise, really, if you read her credits. As a major part of her professional seasoning, she's played lead parts in national tours and New York productions of the stage musicals "Jesus Christ Superstar," "Rent" and "Aida."

Simone has been singing since childhood in Mount Vernon, N.Y., when she took the part of the first wife in "The King and I" just so she could sing "Something Wonderful," a song her mom had recorded for the "Broadway-Blues-Ballads" album.

But after her parents broke up when she was "7 or 8," and the little girl set off with her oft-depressed mom on a vagabond globe-trotting lifestyle, young Simone's feelings about the music industry soured.

"We moved to North Carolina, then Barbados, then Monrovia in Liberia before the coup," she recalled. "Then I wound up in Switzerland in boarding school. In the middle of my senior year, I had a period of rebelliousness and flew back to New York to live with my dad.

"Overnight I went from boarding school in Luzerne to public school in New York City. I thought my classmates were going to eat me up and spit me out."

Then, when Simone's college plans didn't work out, she up and enlisted in the Air Force. "My mother was aghast. She and my godmother tried to talk me out of it, but I went."

Studying civil engineering ("I can build a building from the ground up"), Simone found herself stationed in Germany. She rose to the rank of staff sergeant. Then, one fateful night, she went to a bar, tossed back a few, got up and started singing.

A friend in the audience was so impressed, he later connected her with a club vocalist named Joan Faulkner, who was looking for a background singer.

"I thought, 'I can harmonize and kick my tail from side to side,' so I started performing in places like Munich and Heidelberg," Simone said. "Then, when I was 28, I did my first solo show at a ski resort in Switzerland and first sang a song associated with my mother, 'My Baby Just Cares For Me.' The reaction was so good, I started thinking, 'Maybe this is what I want to do with my life.' Singing was like breathing for me."

Quitting the Air Force after just over a decade, and now starting to call herself just Simone, she traveled with the Spanish hitmaker Raphael for a couple years, then moved to Los Angeles for a short-lived stint in a girl trio called Aura.

Along the way, she also had four children, now ages 24 to 8. She's a grandmom once over, too.

Simone "fell into" stage work, starting in 1995 with a ragged touring company of "Jesus Christ Superstar" ("we slept sitting up on the bus"), then graduating to a much better gig in "Rent" and some time fronting the Chicago-based, acid-jazz band Liquid Soul, which won a Grammy nomination and "performed at every House of Blues in the country."

She finally started performing with her mom in 1999 (you can hear one of those nights in the opening moments of "Simone on Simone"), and Nina at last began to "support me in my choice of a musical career," said her progeny.

It wasn't until Simone was on Broadway in "Aida" in 2002, though, that her mother finally got to see her act and sing. That was the last time the two would be together.

Nina took ill at her home in the South of France. A year later, as the end was nigh, the younger Simone accepted an honorary degree from Curtis Institute on her mom's behalf. As a teen, Nina had been rejected by the prestigious Philadelphia music school and claimed racial discrimination.

"She was really out of it, unable to speak, not reacting to anything," said Simone. "But when told about getting the degree, I'm told she managed a smile." Yes, her mom had a reputation for being haughty, angry and unpredictable. She was often like that at home, too, Simone allowed.

That retaliatory spirit fueled her protest-flavored art. And at times it also was her undoing. In a mid-1970s, captured-on-video performance from the Montreux Jazz Festival, which Simone recently let loose on an Eagle Rock DVD, you can see that the woman is extremely out of it, unfocused and complaining, a prima donna of the worst sort.

"Everybody has a story," shared the younger Simone (who describes herself as "not like that at all"). "Whenever I've met someone who's a veteran of the music industry, I'm wondering 'Hmmm, did Mom hit this guy over the head with a champagne bottle?'

"As an adult, I've tried to make sense of it. I think it all goes back to the 1930s, when a person like my mom - very dark-skinned, with big lips - had to endure a lot of insults in a place like North Carolina. Add being a child prodigy on top of that. The insecurity, the rage, never fully left her. She was still in search of things that would make her accepted. She always felt like she was from another planet.

"I often tell people, 'Don't let our great ones pass without letting them know how we feel about them,' " concluded Simone on the elder Simone. "Maybe it would have made a difference. She died alone, not knowing how much she was loved by the world. Performing her music, I've been able to see and hear that. I wish she had." *

World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St., 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, $20, 215-222-1400, www.worldcafelive.com.