She first performed at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem when she was 4. But unlike many precocious kids, Patti Austin has gone on to a long and enjoyable career in music.

“I’ve lived my entire live in (music), and let me tell you it’s a delicious place to live,” she says.

Austin will open the Pittsburgh Symphony Pops season this weekend, performing “Beyond The American Songbook.” Guest conductor Lawrence Loh will lead the Pop at Oct. 20 to 22 concerts at Heinz Hall, Pittsburgh.

From roots in jazz — she won the Best Jazz Album Grammy for “Avant Gershwin” in 2007 — Austin has become an uncommonly versatile musician.

“I sing all over the world and tailor shows to what audiences want,” she says. “When I go to Nashville, I sing country. In New York City, it’s dance and pops stuff. We’re doing a hybrid show at Heinz Hall. I’m doing some material from my Ella Fitzgerald show (and Grammy-nominated album), some of my pops repertoire. We’re mixing it up — from the Beatles to Duke Ellington.”

Austin feels blessed to have grown up in a very musical home. Her father was jazz trombonist Gordon Austin, who performed with Earl “Fatha” Hines, Billy Eckstein, Lena Horne and Dinah Washington. He loved music eclectically. Music was always around. As a child, she might have heard a record of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” playing when she woke, and great jazz records before going to bed.

After making her own solo albums as a teenager, Austin fell into more lucrative commercial work in New York City. It began with a call from an agent who had booked backup singers for Austin’s albums, who asked her to consider singing backup for a recording session that night with James Brown. Austin was delighted because she’d already performed with him years earlier. After an excited reunion, they got down to work performing Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

“I went on doing studio work until I got the call every background singer dreamt of in those days — someone asking you to sing on a jingle. That was the coveted position for singers,” Austin says.

The reason was the residuals, the payments that come every time the jingle was played on television or radio. Her first jingle was written by Barry Manilow for Dr Pepper, “I’m a Pepper, He’s a Pepper, She’s a Pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too.” It was on incessantly. The checks kept coming.

Commercial singing helped Austin develop her versatility but required new discipline. Her ear was so good as a child she needed to hear something just once to know it. In commercial work she needed to tighten up her sight reading, singing the music on a page as fluently as reading a printed sentence out loud.

“My strength had become a weakness,” she admits. “I had become a lazy reader.”

Mark Kanny is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.

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