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She first made her mark as the “Queen of Hip-Hop,” becoming the first female rapper to notch a gold record, while opening the door for a generation of female rappers to follow.

But these days, Queen Latifah is making an entirely different kind of music, having now released two albums in succession — ” The Dana Owens Album” and “Trav’lin’ Light”– in which she sings standards from the jazz, soul, blues and “Great American Songbook” realms.

She’ll play a sold-out show at the Rehoboth Beach Convention Center on Friday as part of the 18th annual Rehoboth Beach Autumn Jazz Festival, followed by a concert Wednesday at the Grand Opera House in Wilmingotn.

She suddenly sees a musical future for herself that few would have envisioned when she arrived on the scene with her debut CD, 1989’s “All Hail the Queen.” “I’ve always envisioned that I could sing songs like this for the rest of my life,” said Latifah, who lives in Colts Neck, N.J. “It would be mighty cool to be like Tony Bennett.”

Actually, considering the success Latifah has enjoyed with acting and as a talk-show host (”The Queen Latifah Show”) … it’s hard to envision her devoting all her efforts toward a single pursuit such as singing. “I looked at this as part of me growing up, that I could sort of release this side of myself,” said Latifah during a recent telephone interview. “I just always feel like the more I go on through my career that I’ll be able to explore different sides of my talents and abilities and be able to share that with the world. That’s always my hope. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. But I’m always on the optimistic side.”

As Latifah’s star continued to rise during the 1990s, she grew to be seen as a role model for women. She unabashedly embraced being a plus-size beauty who could exude confidence at every turn. “I was raised to believe that beauty comes from the inside out,” Latifah said.

Latifah’s career as an actress may actually be at a new peak now. She’s been in several highly successful films in recent years, including “The Bone Collector,” “Bringing Down the House,” “Chicago” (for which she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress) and, just this past summer, “Hairspray.”

But this fall, she’s jazzing it up on the road.

The tour focuses on material from “The Dana Owens Album” and “Trav’lin Light.”

She sees the two CDs as being very closely related musically.

“I think the main things that separate this album and the last album is I really wanted to do some big band on the last album, and I really didn’t get to, some big band swing kind of stuff,” Latifah said. “So I did get to do two (songs) on this album in that vein.”

Latifah said she is feeling more confident than ever about performing songs from these CDs live.

“I did 25 dates (in 2005) with Erykah Badu and Jill Scott on the Sugarwater Festival, and I did a bunch of dates last summer,” she said. “So I think I just started to feel more comfortable singing live, entire shows, whereas I had never really done that before.”

When it comes to her career, there actually haven’t been many setbacks for the woman who was born in Newark in 1970 as Dana Owens.

She began rapping when she was in high school, and in college got involved with Afrika Bambaataa’s “Native Tongues” collective, which favored a more positive, Afro-centric brand of hip-hop. A demo she recorded during this period landed Latifah a contract with Tommy Boy Records. She made an immediate impact with “All Hail the Queen,” which yielded the hit single “Ladies First.”

But it wasn’t until her third CD, “Black Reign,” that Latifah truly broke through. A single from that 1993 album, “U.N.I.T.Y.,” went Top 10 on the R&B chart, and it won her a Grammy for best solo rap performance.

In those early years, Latifah had to focus on immediate goals, but she already knew this was just the first stage for her career.

“First of all, I had to become a rapper,” Latifah said. “I had to establish myself as a female. I had to establish myself as a business person running (my) own management company … and even push forward rap music in general, because back then people were still calling it a trend that’s going to die out. It won’t last. People probably behaved that same way toward rock ‘n’ roll. But rock ‘n’ roll lasted and so did hip-hop. We always knew it would, but we had to sort of prove that to the masses that just did not want to accept that we were here. So that’s a lot of what we contended with back then. But I always saw the future, I felt like it could go on and on and expand.”

Actually, even as “Black Reign” was going gold and establishing Latifah as the legitimate female rap star, she already had begun pursuing acting, with roles in the movies “Jungle Fever,” “House Party 2″ and “Juice” and an appearance on the TV series “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” among her earliest credits.

A big break came in 1993, when she landed a co-starring role in the Fox television series “Living Single.” From this point on, Latifah became known as much for her acting as for music.

“Living Single” enjoyed a four-year run before being canceled in 1997, and it wasn’t until the next year that she returned to music, releasing the CD “Order in the Court.” This time, Latifah shifted her sound more toward R&B, and made her singing a focus on the album (with duets with Faith Evans and Pras from the Fugees).

But acting still was a priority. In 1998, she had roles in the movies “Sphere” and “Living Out Loud.” In the latter, she sang several jazz standards, a hint of the direction her music would take six years later with “The Dana Owens Album.”