For Marina Garza, the eureka moment hit one night at the Great American Music Hall, after she played an opening set for the funk-driven collective B-Side Players.

The trumpeter was performing with the Latin-tinged R&B band Resin, and upon hearing B-Side's insistent grooves, she decided to create her own group, Orquesta d'Soul. The salsa-soul group performs on Tuesday at Santana Row in the San Jose Jazz Society's free concert series. D'Soul also plays on Aug. 9 in Redwood City as part of the Stafford Park Summer Concert Series.

"When I heard B-Side Players, I really got interested in a mixture of Latin, funk and hip-hop. That's what really inspired me to blend those sounds," says the Oakland-based Garza, who has been a significant force on the Bay Area music scene since moving eight years ago from her native San Antonio.

Garza first made an impression in the Bay Area as a member of the swaggering Montclair Women's Big Band, a hard-charging jazz orchestra led by trumpeter Ellen Seeling and saxophonist Jean Fineberg. Since 2001, Garza has played a leading role in raising the visibility of female instrumentalists in Latin music, organizing a series of concerts to showcase many of the region's strong female players at the Little Fox in Redwood City and La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley.

"I had started performing on the Bay Area salsa scene in the late '90s, and I was working with an all-women band," says Garza, referring to the now-defunct Dulce Mambo. "I realized that there were so many women on the scene, and I thought we should have our own celebration. With the exception of vocalists, salsa and Latin music is pretty male-dominated, and it's been very difficult for women instrumentalists to make a name for themselves in the business."

By leading her own band and creating opportunities for other women, Garza has helped turn the Bay Area into a hotbed for women players in Latin music. In her own band, she's embraced a myriad of musical roles, developing an impressive repertoire of original songs in both English and Spanish, while attracting a superb cast, including vocalists Liza Jimenez and Nikki O'Shaughnessy, saxophonist Lori Ponton Rodriguez, bassist Mike Lazarus, drummer Jason Gianni and conguero Patricio Angulo (who also leads the 11-piece salsa orchestra Quimbombo).

"Marina is very important in lots of scenes, but mostly she makes an impression as a strong woman bandleader," Seeling says. "She's an instrumentalist, composer, arranger, soloist, and sometimes she even sings. She can do it all. She's a really good jazz player and a strong salsa player. What I really like about her is that she's a real take-charge kind of musician. She moved here from Texas and started her own thing. It's a very original concept, very accessible and very contemporary, combining salsa, Latin jazz, funk and rap."

Raised in a tight-knit Mexican-American family, Garza got her start performing in her junior high school marching band. She studied European classical music and jazz in college, while listening to funk and hip-hop for pleasure. Salsa, which grew out of the fusion of Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians in New York City, wasn't part of her upbringing. It was while she was subbing in Dulce Mambo that Garza first developed an interest in Afro-Caribbean forms.

She has released two albums with Orquesta d'Soul, most recently the critically praised "Money Money" (Neo-Latin Records). She plans to return to the studio in the fall. Playing to the strengths of her musicians, Garza acknowledges the band has been moving in a salsa direction in recent months.

"The style is really shifting to a traditional Latin base, cumbia, merengue and salsa," Garza says. "The players in the band are driving that. My rhythm section is really versed in Cuban music, and it's one of those styles that feels so good to play when you have a section that's built on that. Of course, we also play Cuban timba, which already has a strong element of funk, but funk is a little more in the background now."

With Garza's blazing trumpet in the foreground, Orquesta d'Soul delivers a satisfying dose of Latin rhythms, leavened with a dash of new and old school R&B.