DAYME Arocena is telling the Herald about the best boyfriend she’s ever had. This is not quite as personal as you might think. The “boyfriend” is in a different city every night. He’s the stage and the twenty-four year old from Havana loves being onstage.

“That’s where I have the most fun,” says Arocena, who makes her Scottish debut at this year’s Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival. “If you’re not having fun with your best boyfriend, there’s no point in continuing the relationship.”

The singer, who habitually dresses in white to honour the Santeria religion she grew up with, wasn’t always so outgoing. She’s been singing, according to family folklore, since before she could talk and her earliest memories are of singing at family get-togethers and neighbourhood parties, of which there seems to have been no shortage when she was growing up. As she became a little older, however, she began to prefer singing in a choir or in a little neighbourhood group where she wasn’t always the centre of attention.

So what happened to change that? “I heard the crowd roaring when our vocal group started to tour round Cuba,” she says. “And I liked that. I still do. If you have a talent that can spread joy the way music can, you have to go out and make people happy.”

Music was always the only career path Arocena wanted to follow. At the age of ten she was talent spotted with her singing group and offered a place at the Amadeo Roldan Conservatory in Havana. For her second instrument she learned piano, although she’d also tried violin, saxophone, flute and guitar without much success.

Choir leading, a popular role with young Cubans, was her speciality and she went on to graduate in this subject. By fourteen, however, she was also singing jazz with a big band and it was this nocturnal activity that set her up for being discovered by BBC 6 presenter, club DJ and jazz scene mover and shaker Gilles Peterson.

Peterson had heard Arocena singing when she was still a teenager in Havana, during a trip to Cuba in the noughties and made a note to keep track of her. He wasn’t alone in admiring her singing. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis had also encountered Arocena and was full of praise for this star in the making who had listened closely to Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston as well as mastering her native music, especially rumba, and had a depth of expression he’d rarely encountered in someone so young.

In 2014, Peterson returned to Havana and sought out Arocena for his Havana Cultura project, which involved singers recording with DJs from around the world. Arocena featured on three tracks and was invited to London for the album launch, following which Peterson signed her to his Brownwood label. Neuva Era, her first album for the label, made waves well beyond Arocena’s expectations.

“The past year and a half has been amazing,” she says. “I still live in Cuba but sometimes I only get back home for a few days before I have to leave and go out on tour again. Gilles has become like my British father because when someone shows as much faith in you as he’s shown in me, he has to be family.”

Subsequent to Neuva Era, Peterson involved Arocena in a feature-length documentary, Havana Club Rumba Sessions: La Clave. It charts rumba’s significance to Cuba’s music and traces its history from slave communities through its preservation and current influence on the younger generation. A team of top Havana musicians was brought together to record the soundtrack and an unplanned spin-off resulted in Arocena’s new recording, One Takes.

“After we’d recorded the soundtrack, Gilles asked all the musicians if they might play some tracks that he usually features in his DJ sets,” says Arocena. “These musicians are the best and they just needed to hear a track once to be able to play it. So we recorded six tracks very quickly – we were having a party, really - and when we heard them played back, we thought, wow. We just added a few backing vocals and we had an EP.”

One Takes is a bonus release, she says, rather than the official follow up to Neuva Era and as she travels extensively throughout Europe and across America she is already gathering ideas for another trip to the studio.

“I don’t force music to come out, I just wait and see what happens, what my muse brings,” she says. “Sometimes I write songs in my dreams and if I like the idea, I wake up and sing it into my phone so that the next day, if I still like it, I can work on it. If I don’t like the idea, I just stay asleep.”

Daymé Arocena appears at George Square Spiegeltent, Edinburgh on Saturday, July 16. Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival runs from July 15 to 24.