People don't often connect the dots to that fact that Lucie Arnaz is legitimately Latina. "I don't play that side of me very often, though I've always said that if I didn't have that side of my family, I don't think I'd have the rhythm or the love of music, or any kind of musical ability at all."

That ability has long been evident. From her Broadway debut in Marvin Hamlisch's They're Playing Our Song, through concert and cabaret engagements, a well-received jazz album and countless benefits, Arnaz has always been a vibrant and talented singer.

"I loved watching my father play guitar or the congas, and listening to him sing. It was my favorite thing as a kid," she remembers. "When he passed away, I found this wonderful little set of cassette tapes that had been compiled by a man in San Francisco named Edward Maffei, who was a discographer and fan of my father's work. He had sent it to my dad years before, and it included all sorts of recordings and broadcasts of Dad's that he had gathered. At the time, I had not heard many of the recordings. Some of them he did on television, but I didn't have copies of everything. So I used to drive around in my little car and listen to these cassettes for hours on end. This was, like, 1987, and it was the whole reason I decided to put together my first club act."

It's not unreasonable for children of the celebrated to strive for their own identity, especially if they enter the family business. For Arnaz, though she's never consciously distanced herself from her parents' work, embracing her father's music on a professional level is a fairly recent development. "I had done an Ira Gershwin show with Tom Wopat for the Lyrics and Lyricists show at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York last May. The artistic director at the time started a conversation with me about what happens to the [musical] arrangements of people like Rosie Clooney and Dean Martin after they are gone. What happens to their charts?

"She wondered what I had done with all my father's charts from my father's band. 'Funny you should ask,' I said, because I had 20 boxes of them that sat in my garage for over a decade. I'd dip into them from time to time, but mostly they just sat there. Then Michael Feinstein recommended that I look into giving them to the Library of Congress, which has an extensive music division that catalogs and preserves these kinds of documents. So I told her that's what I had finally done with them."

Out of the conversation came the idea of a retrospective of Latin music in America, but only as seen through the Desi Arnaz Orchestra. "It seemed like a pretty fabulous idea, because what I remembered of the charts and what I had on CD was really terrific stuff. So Ron Abel, my musical director, and I spent three days at the Library of Congress going through all the charts again, and running into the piano room every five minutes to hear what this or that would sound like. We're still hard at work on it."

Desi Arnaz wrote a number of songs his band played, but he left the arranging to more practiced hands. "He had a marvelous pianist-arranger named Marco Rizo, whom he met when he was a kid in Santiago, Cuba. Marco helped get him the best music there was at the time – this was the 1940s. Dad brought it back to LA when they opened at Ciro's, and they toured and did a bunch of recordings for RCA. He had another fellow named John Pickering, who played trombone in the band and also did many of the arrangements."

Delving deep into the music has fueled movement on another long-considered goal.  "When we committed to the Y, I looked at Ron and said, 'Okay. Now we have to do the Latin roots album we have been talking about for 10 years." If all goes according to her plan, by the time Arnaz arrives in San Francisco she will have recorded, mixed and delivered the master tapes for Lucie: Latin Roots, her first studio album in 15 years, to her distributor at LML Music.

She may not have the actual CD by then, but San Francisco audiences will certainly get a taste of what's to come. "We won't have the orchestra or as much percussion as I usually like to have, but we're going to try to do as much of the new stuff as we can at the Rrazz Room," she offers, "and not just doing big cumbanchero-type Latin songs. We're doing things like 'Blame It on the Bossa Nova' and 'Johnny Angel,' but with an Astrud Gilberto bent. The rest will be some Lucie-Arnaz-ish stuff – whatever that means!"

An Evening with Lucie Arnaz at the Rrazz Room at Hotel Nikko, Dec. 8-12 at  8 p.m., Dec. 13 at 7 p.m. Tickets ($45-$50): (866) 468-3399 or www.therrazzroom.com