Sun Bronx apartment of the pianist Valerie Capers as she played the Cy Coleman classic “The Best Is Yet to Come,” caressing each word in her warm, husky voice. With only a week to go, she was rehearsing every day for her September 3 debut at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the opening night of the monthlong “Diet Coke Women in Jazz Festival.” Cindy Blackman, Renee Rosnes, Carol Sloane and other top artists will also perform in the series.

“I’m not quite satisfied,” Ms. Capers said to the bassist John Robinson, a member of her quintet. “Try it with me?” Setting up next to the piano, he said, “Valerie, you’re never satisfied!” Laughing, she replied, “You’re right about that!” They swung into the tune.

If Ms. Capers, 65, didn’t wear dark glasses, it would take some time to realize that she is blind, having lost her sight at six as a result of a childhood illness. But while it never hindered her career as an educator, it did slow wide recognition of her impressive gifts as a jazz artist. Success in jazz depends on giving your all, and between the difficulties inherent in being blind and the demands of a full-time teaching position — she only retired from the faculty of Bronx Community College two years ago — it was impossible for her to do. Until recently.

“Jazz is my first and deepest love,” she said, leaving the piano for a couch in her living room. “It opened up and expanded my life in ways that would otherwise have been impossible. Nothing’s going to stop me now.”

Certainly colleagues and critics appreciate Ms. Capers. She has played gigs with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Max Roach, Pacquito D’Rivera, and Wynton Marsalis, and released five critically acclaimed albums.

“Valerie is like no one else,” the singer Sheila Jordan said. “Her playing is rich and warm and overflowing with life and love.” Dizzy Gillespie called her first album, “Affirmation,” a “a sheer delight.”

The music critic John Wilson went into more detail: “There are moments when her thick chords, punched out on a lagging beat, evoke Erroll Garner. There are bright trills that suggest Earl Hines, running single notes that might have come from Bud Powell. These are all just accents that color developments that are Miss Capers’s own, although when she sweeps into Duke Ellington’s ‘’Take the ‘A’ Train,” she projects the grandeur and vitality of the whole Ellington band.”

Ms. Capers made her mark as a teacher and coach as well, developing hundreds of jazz musicians during the past 40 years. “Valerie changed my life,” Mr. Robinson, who became her student in 1977, said. “When I met her, I’d only played Latin and a little jazz. She taught me the intricacies of interpretation, timing and phrasing. At improvisation, she’s awesome — no one’s better.”

A regular at New York’s Knickerbocker Club and the Lenox Lounge, Ms. Capers is only now gaining more attention in Europe. She has been invited to teach and perform at the annual Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria every summer and to join the roster of the popular Copenhagen Jazz Festival next year. Other European jazz festivals are also in the offing.

At home, blindness doesn’t prevent her from honoring her idols with memorabilia. On the wall near her dining room table hangs a life mask of Richard Wagner, a poster from the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and a photograph of Duke Ellington. Nor has it kept her from indulging a wide range of interests. She takes vacations to Disney World and taught herself both French and gourmet cooking.

Nor does blindness completely define Ms. Capers’s memory. She still recalls the last things she saw as a child. “I remember my father wrapping me in a tan blanket to take me to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital,” she said. “It was snowing lightly when we got into a yellow taxi. I remember what appeared to be ghostly figures standing around my bed. They must have been the doctors. When I finally was released, the family moved to another neighborhood in the Bronx. None of us wanted to be in the same house or area anymore.”

In her new home, Ms. Capers gravitated toward the piano, and began lessons. At 11, her parents enrolled her in the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind, where she continued to study, encouraged by the teacher Elizabeth Thody. “She prepared me for Juilliard,” she said. “She thought I had a very good ear, and a lot of potential.”

Ms. Capers proved to have more than potential. She became the first blind student to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Juilliard School. “The hardest thing I ever had to do,” she said, “was to read music in Braille. You can’t imagine what it’s like to learn Beethoven and Bach in Braille. But it’s been crucial for my career.” After graduation, she became a professor of music at, among other schools, the Manhattan School of Music and Bronx Community College, where she chaired the department of music and art for eight years.

Through all her schooling, Ms. Capers missed only the opportunity to study jazz. Occasionally, she’d discover a jazz lecture at Juilliard but, by and large, she had to educate herself by listening to records and relying on her brother, Bobby, who was a jazz musician. (The Juilliard School established a Jazz Studies program in 2001.)

“The ’50s were such a fantastic time in jazz,” she said. “I thought Charlie Parker and Dizzy were on Mt. Olympus and I could never get there. My brother suggested I slow down the speed on their records so I could follow what they were doing. That’s when they became more accessible and I began memorizing lines.”

As a pianist, Ms. Capers finds inspiration in Ahmad Jamal, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, and Red Garland, but no one influenced her more than the saxophonist John Coltrane. “When I heard his progress from the early ’50s with Miles to his recording ‘Giant Steps’ in 1960,” she said, “I saw what could be accomplished in jazz. Others grew by inches — ‘Trane grew by yards. I use that as an example.”

Gifted as both a classical and jazz pianist, Ms. Capers described the difference. “As a classical musician, you are the servant of the composers — you try to discover what they wanted to achieve. With jazz, you’re not interpreting; you’re composing on the spot. You have to develop your technique to the highest level so you can respond immediately. You should listen to everything — I listen to Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Beethoven — so all that will go into your creative soul. Then you can call upon all kinds of music during your performances. That’s the thrill. That’s the challenge and that’s the beauty of jazz.”

Moved by her own words, Ms. Capers excused herself and returned to the piano. And with heightened emotion, she launched into “The Best Is Yet To Come” one more time.