Chilean-born singer Camila Meza performs Friday at art museum

Camila Meza's latest album began with a dream. The Chilean-born singer/guitarist found herself driving along a beach filled with colorful precious stones, each unique and beautiful. She stopped her car and stepped onto the beach, wanting to pick up every one and carry it home. Upon closer inspection, however, she discovered a few stones stood out from the rest.

"Eventually, I took home the ones that really struck me as more beautiful and more connected to what I was experiencing," Meza said on the phone from her New York home. "It felt like the same process you go through with songs or with any kind of art-making. You're choosing what you're attracted to or what you want to express. Sometimes as an artist, you want to grab everything, but then there's a moment where you focus on what you want to take from your own inner beauty, to bring out and share."

Traces, released this year, is the first of Meza's albums to feature mostly her original music. It's fitting that she'll make her Philadelphia debut as a bandleader at the Art Museum on Friday, as there's a vivid sense of color and texture in her sound. It isn't hard to picture that shimmering, multi-hued beach when listening to the birdsong lilt of "Para Volar" or the urgent "Emerald," in which Meza's voice follows Björk-inspired winding paths as the rhythm surges like waves crashing on rocks.

"I love the visual arts, and I see them very much in my music," Meza said. "I see colors in certain songs and tonalities, and I love to apply that to try to create an impression."

Meza's only previous visit to the city was as part of trombonist/composer Ryan Keberle's band Catharsis, which played at MilkBoy in April during the Center City Jazz Festival. In that ensemble, she typically sings wordlessly, making her voice another instrument in the mix. In that context, it's clear how strongly her phrasing as a vocalist and as a guitarist complement one another. Though she sings lyrics in three languages (English, Spanish, and Portuguese), at least as much meaning can be found in the interaction of strings and voice as in the words themselves.

"There's an essential place where they meet," she said. "Whether I'm playing guitar or I'm singing, I try to bring myself into the music and connect with my own experience so I can bring out emotions. That's what I love about music, that it releases so much of what you cannot tell in other ways."

The vibrant storytelling and expressiveness throughout Traces, which includes songs by Stephen Sondheim, Jon Brion, Brazilian composer Djavan, and Chilean songwriter Victor Jara, show just how evocatively Meza can blend the two voices to conjure an emotional frisson. Many of the songs on the album reflect on her distance from home - she's lived in New York for seven years - and the connection that music makes to bridge all those miles and cultures.

"Wherever you grow up is going to become a deep part of yourself," she said. "When I write music, those influences come out in different ways."

Though she's been singing her whole life, Meza never intended to use her voice on stage. Growing up in a musical family in Santiago, she heard classical music from her pianist father and rock and fusion from her older brother, a drummer. She started playing guitar in rock and funk bands, but found something lacking in those genres.

"I was looking for a freedom that I couldn't find anywhere," she said. "When I discovered jazz, the broadness and the sophistication of the harmonies were the answer to everything that I was looking for. I felt at home."

She initially emulated relatively modern idols, like Pat Metheny and George Benson, later tracing the history back to find such jazz guitar pioneers as Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall. A teacher heard her sing and encouraged her to take her vocals as seriously as she did her guitar playing. "I saw myself growing up so much by doing both," she said. "The voice has brought more lyricism to the guitar and the guitar has brought more harmonic and melodic knowledge to the voice.

"But I want to be able to express both of them in a very fluent way, so I need to keep working."