Peruvian pop star to Jersey housewife?

Eva Ayllon, Peru’s premier pop performer, says she’s tired of show business. She’s been at it for 34 years, showered with adulation by stadiums full of fans. Now she wants to settle down with her new husband in New Jersey and just be a housewife. She dreams not of more fame and new horizons, but of cooking her man’s meals and washing his underwear.

Yet Ayllon, 48, didn’t look anywhere near ready to retire during her high-spirited and virtually impeccable performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Sunday. On the contrary, the singer was like the Tina Turner of Afro-Peruvian music -- energetic and playful, sexy and fully charged.

World music fans may be more familiar with her low-key colleague Susana Baca, who has recorded for David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. But Sunday’s show left no doubt that when it comes to genuine Afro-Peruvian music, the kind that crystallizes centuries of cultural history on stage, Ayllon leads the field.

“When I have the microphone in my hands, I have the strength and vitality of a girl of 3,” she said in an interview last week. “Nobody can stop me then. And I don’t want the evening to end.

“But when I finish singing ... ay! ... everything hurts. And I feel fed up.”

Ayllon says her managers tell her not to talk like that. This is no time to surrender, just as they’re trying to expand her audience beyond her faithful Peruvian base. They want to attract more Latinos from other nations and especially more Anglo Americans, which explains why Ayllon frequently, and humorously, addressed Sunday’s predominantly Latino audience in her broken English.

Surprisingly in this crossover age, Ayllon’s career has lacked a comprehensive marketing strategy beyond her country’s borders. Though she’s made 22 albums, the singer has never had a domestic U.S. release -- until now.

“Eva! Leyenda Peruana” on Times Square Records is a compilation of hits newly recorded for the U.S. market. It serves as both a survey of her repertoire and a primer on the festive genre itself, popular in coastal areas around Lima.

Her show, which drew heavily from the album, highlighted the spectrum of distinctive rhythms developed by the descendants of slaves in Peru -- the undulating lando, the frenzied festejo and the bawdy alcatraz. They are only distant cousins of more familiar Afro-Cuban dance styles. But the instrumentation and the improvisational spirit is similar to salsa.

Ayllon, whose voice can be both powerful and tender, has also helped modernize the elegant vals criollo, or Creole waltz, one of the loveliest styles on the continent.

Her eight-member backup group had two outstanding young soloists, guitarist Luis Manrique and pianist Moises Lamas, plus a powerhouse rhythm section featuring the typical Peruvian cajon, a crate played much as slaves once did in the fields.

Ayllon used a piano as a prop, leaning on it like an old-fashioned crooner and even using it like a practice bar for freestyle dance moves during a particularly exciting jam segment.

The singer seemed to thoroughly enjoy herself during the 90-minute show, converting the stately stage into a pena criolla, the intimate bohemian venues where Peruvians go to eat, drink, dance and listen to this music. Moving with the agility of a woman half her age, Ayllon strutted across the entire stage like a rock star, wildly shook her long black hair and vibrated her hips with erotic abandon in the style typical of this Afro-folkloric music. She kissed her pianist’s hand, hugged her guitarist and did playful mating dances with her percussionists, all to the delight of the audience.

At one point, Ayllon gave a private greeting to a person seated near the front. “Terlinda,” she said in English, “I love you so much.”

She gave no explanation to the audience. But during the interview over lunch three days earlier, Ayllon said she had lost touch with an aunt, Terlinda Ayllon Garcia, who had moved to Los Angeles. She hoped to find her on this trip and hired a private detective to track her down.

She obviously did. The reunion meant a lot because Terlinda, her father’s sister, helped the family survive by sending home $50 every month. It was a kindness the little girl from Lima never forgot.

Ayllon, the oldest of 14 children, was born to a seamstress and a driver who worked for a union. Her father named her Maria Angelica, she recalls, after his mistress who lived nearby. Her mother didn’t discover the infidelity until the girl was being baptized at age 3. In the midst of the ensuing family uproar, her baptismal name was quickly changed to Eva, after the paternal grandmother who raised her.

Despite the conflict, little Eva performed at the party that day, singing boleros while standing on a conga drum. Though she never had any formal training, she’s been singing ever since.

After a long-distance, on-and-off relationship over the past 23 years, Ayllon last year married Juan Yatakami, a Peruvian American from New Jersey. They have an 18-year-old son together, and each has one other son from separate relationships. She plans to move to the States later this year with her blended family.

Sure, she’s tired of the business -- weary of watching her weight, of being on the road, of doing interviews like a beginner for new audiences, of always being compared to Baca.

Still, Ayllon has no plans to stop singing.

“I really would like to rest now,” she says. “I think I’ve given enough of myself to my country, and I don’t need to explain anything anymore.

“But in the end, I keep going because I love it.”