(Heads Up)

''Esperanza'' has got a lot: accomplished jazz improvisation, funk, scat singing, Brazilian vernacular rhythm and vocals in English, Portuguese and Spanish. At its center is a female bassist, singer and bandleader, one whose talent is beyond question. But the music is missing a crucial measure of modesty.

Even if this were the 1940s, when superior jazz musicians came out of the gate at very young ages, Esperanza Spalding would still have time to develop. She's 24, originally from Oregon and now part of the New York jazz scene. One of her central gifts is a light, fizzy, optimistic drive that's in her melodic bass playing and her elastic, small-voiced singing. In the absence of maturity, this will do.

You could hear it in ''Junjo,'' her first album, released three years ago when hardly anyone had heard of her outside of Portland, Ore., and Boston, where she was already a teacher at Berklee College of Music. On that album Ms. Spalding was pushed hard by the pianist and drummer Aru?Ortiz and the drummer Francisco Mela, Cuban jazz musicians who didn't indicate every beat and chord change, and she was already transmitting her well-informed desire to merge South American popular music, Cuban rhythm and jazz.

''Esperanza,'' made with a different group -- centrally Leo Genovese on piano and Otis Brown on drums, but here and there the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, the drummer Horacio (El Negro) Hernandez, the percussionist Jamey Haddad, the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the guitarist Ni?osele -- leaves far less to the imagination. This is mostly acoustic music played by jazz musicians and owes as much to Stevie Wonder as Wayne Shorter. It's an attempt at bringing this crisscrossing to a new level of definition and power, but its vamps and grooves are a little obvious, and it pushes her first as a singer-songwriter, which isn't her primary strength.

Outside of a rearranged version of Milton Nascimento's ''Ponta de Areia'' and a Spanish version of ''Body and Soul'' in 5/4 time, the word-stuffed songs are mostly hers. You can try not to sweat those words, but they're a barrier. They're juvenilia, shining on about love and hope and predestination and idealism, and they make her fresh, guileless quality start looking like its opposite: grandiosity. BEN RATLIFF