VITORIA, Spain — The crowds filing into the 4,000-seat Mendizorrotza Sports Arena to see Buika at the Vitoria Jazz Festival last July could only guess at what the evening would offer. Though the Spanish singer’s plaintive hit “Mi Niña Lola,” the title track of her best-selling 2006 release, had saturated the airwaves for months, few were familiar with her extraordinary range or understood how she had earned a place on the roster with Ornette Coleman, McCoy Tyner, and Terrence Blanchard at one of Europe’s most prestigious jazz festivals.

But as Buika poured her heart into the love song “Ojos Verdes,” any questions fell by the wayside. Small, with short brown hair framing her pretty face, she glided around the stage in a flowing white dress. Moving effortlessly from old Spanish ballads to flamenco to jazz standards like “My One and Only Love,” accompanied by the trumpet player Terrell Stafford, she had people whispering names like Edith Piaf and Nina Simone.

New Yorkers can judge for themselves when Buika makes her American debut Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. One of two concerts in the New Voices From Spain series — the other features the pop group Macacao on Saturday — it should help overturn stereotypes about popular Spanish music. Foreigners may assume that Spaniards only enjoy flamenco and catchy love songs, but they equally treasure coplas, touching poems set to music that first gained popularity in the 1930s.

It was by singing coplas that Buika first made her name. “I heard them as a child,” she said over breakfast the morning after her concert here. “Ordinary people sing them as they go about their work. They move me deeply with their earthiness and simplicity.” With her newest release, “Mi Niña Lola,” the 35-year-old singer is spreading the beauty of coplas beyond Spanish borders. “Buika is no conventional flamenco singer,” wrote one English music critic. “Her husky voice is seeped in R&B and gospel, and her immaculate band has all the elegance and poise of a straight ahead jazz group. The results are nothing less than hypnotic. A star is born.”

Buika was born in Majorca to political refugees from Equatorial Guinea in West Africa, which was once a Spanish colony. As members of the Bantu tribe, they spoke the Bube language, which she learned along with Spanish. It was difficult for her parents to find work, and when Buika’s father left to return to Africa, things became harder. Her mother cleaned houses and offices. Those first few years, the family — Buika, her six brothers and sisters, and their mother — moved from hotel to hotel. “My mom would look out the window as we played in the street,” she said, “making sure that we didn’t get into trouble. But when she couldn’t be there, I felt someone else watched out for me. My faith in that saved me.”

Music also sustained her. She learned African and Spanish songs, and American jazz and R&B, her mother’s favorites. “My mom told me that music was the language of the soul, the connection between the past and the future. When I started singing in local clubs, I didn’t ask for money — until my auntie insisted — because in Africa, your voice is considered a gift that you give away.”

At 17, Buika graduated from singing in local bars to Majorca’s tourist hotels, where Western guests often requested blues, R&B, and jazz. “I grew to love jazz more and more,” she said. “People like Billie Holiday, Betty Carter, Cassandra Wilson. As a singer, you can’t hide in jazz. I love that. I liked American ’80s music too, especially Bonnie Raitt and Tina Turner. The hotels dubbed me the ‘Spanish Tina,’ and I wore a wig to look like her.”

Times became tougher for Buika after the birth of her son in 2000, and after a brief period in London she decided to try her luck in Las Vegas. “When I arrived there, I didn’t have any money and I didn’t know anyone,” she said. “I remember sitting in a crummy hotel one night, with my 2-year-old little boy, and thinking, ‘I have to do it. I have no choice.’ I finally got one of the hotels to take my Tina Turner routine.”

Not surprisingly, Las Vegas wasn’t the answer, and Buika returned to Spain. But she was also an anomaly in that world, a loner who preferred to stay home with her son when she wasn’t working. But one night during a gig in a small bar, as she sang “My One and Only Love,” a trumpet began to play along with her. At first she didn’t know where the sound was coming from. Then, down the stairs, from the club above, Jerry Gonzalez appeared. “He had heard me during his performance, and he came to tell me that he loved my voice,” she said. “I started crying. Such a big star, blessing my stage. From that day on, we became fast friends.”

Inspired, Buika began to write songs, accumulating more than 100 in two years. She even put together an all-woman cello band, and made her own recordings. Still naïve, she gave them to a friend who ended up selling them to a record company in Majorca, and Buika earned nothing.

Finally, though, Buika had gained the confidence entirely to be herself. She made a couple of records and started fielding requests to sing all over Europe, South America, and Japan. “I’m not sure what happened,” she said. “But I knew I didn’t have to wear makeup on stage if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to dress up if I didn’t want to. The music makes me feel beautiful, and I’m only on stage because of the music. I’m no longer afraid I won’t be able to give food to my boy. And I want to have more babies, and to sing the songs about the loneliness of old women and people’s daily hardship and love. Coplas. Jazz. All of it. I’m free.”