E-Mail This Article to a Friend Singing for their supper (continued)

From her first album, Monheit’s producers have surrounded her with the best jazz musicians — Kenny Barron, Ron Carter, Bucky Pizzarelli, and on the new album Geoff Keezer, Christian McBride, and Lewis Nash. On an up-tempo "Love Me or Leave Me," saxophonists Donald Harrison and Joel Frahm engage in a spirited, satisfying alto-tenor duel. The arrangements — variously for small band, big band, and orchestra with strings — are mostly by her regular pianist, Michael Kanan, but also with guest turns by Alan Broadbent and Vince Mendoza.

Monheit can swing, but it’s not the kind of killing swing Krall can unleash on an up-tempo standard (say, "I Love Being Here with You"). On the opening "Honeysuckle Rose," Monheit has all the right jazz moves — rushing ahead and falling behind the beat, alternating tension and relaxation, scatting seven or so syllables on the vowel of "Rose." But Krall knows that it’s the choice of notes — and the way you play the chord changes — that’s as responsible for swing’s momentum as is the rhythmic placement of a note, and whether you choose to sing the opening four bars of a song all on a single note or take a leap up an octave at the turn-around. By comparison, Monheit’s swing can be a bit mannered.

But her voice and her control are unassailable. And on Jorge Calandrelli’s string arrangement of Porter’s "In the Still of the Night," she works it — pitch-perfect, lush, and just a trace of vibrato. There’s a husky catch on the word "Like" when she sings "Like the moon growing dim." But when she takes off on her upper register for one endless breath of "Darling when I say to you/Do you love me," joining that "do" and "you" into one long, long syllable — well, you get every penny of your Monheit money’s worth. It’s a climax she builds to in calibrated steps from hush to cry, and that jump in register from "you" to "do." She goes for the big moments without overselling them, even if some of her scatting pop-embellished codas can be a little cutesy.

With her opulent hush of a voice, smaller range, and general understatedness, Peyroux never oversells anything. Her material tends toward blues, and if anything, her pedigree is both more ancient and more contemporary than Monheit’s, her sources more varied. On Careless Love, she covers the William C. Handy title tune, Bob Dylan’s "You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome," Hank Williams’s "Weary Blues," and Leonard Cohen’s "Dance Me to the End of Love." It’s a retro acoustic vibe throughout — Larry Goldings on organ and a variety of ancient keyboards, from Wurlitzer piano to Estey organ, and celesta, David Piltch playing acoustic bass, Dean Parks joining Peyroux on guitars, and Jay Bellarose preferring brushes to sticks on his drums. In its instrumentation and focus, it sounds like a singer-songwriter’s album as much as a jazz album. She even collaborated with Norah Jones’s pal Jesse Harris for the one original tune, "Don’t Wait Too Long."

Peyroux’s resemblance to Holiday would seem an affectation if it weren’t for that focus. She readily credits producer Larry Klein for keeping the production small and simple, but you could also say he simply knows how to play to her strengths, and the inclusion of the Josephine Baker–associated "J’ai deux amours" goes back to Peyroux’s own childhood — at 13, her mother and father separated and her mother took Madeleine to Paris. Her parents were both teachers — her mother of French language and literature, her father an actor who taught drama and film — and they were "not just intellectual," she tells me on the phone from her home in New York, "but radically so."

Peyroux’s album is driven as much by intellectual curiosity as by a love of singing and song, and she gives every word a weight, with delicate Holiday-like bluesy bends and dips into her full lower register. The lyrics of Elliott Smith’s "Between the Bars" wend their way through the band’s smoky backdrop, a tolling bass interval and gonglike cymbal: "Drink up baby stay up all night," and then a harmonic downshift for "Things you could do/You won’t but you might" as a concertina-like wheezing keyboard kicks in. A two-chord vamp doesn’t make her sound any less like "jazz," especially with the understated 2/4 and 4/4 meters that drive a steady groove in every piece. Now 31, Peyroux had a couple of false starts after Dreamland: albums that were begun for Atlantic, then Columbia, both abandoned, and vocal problems in between. And there was the expected but no less unsettling pressure that came to a young singer with a surprise hit. Now that she’s back, let’s hope she sticks around.

Jane Monheit performs next Friday, November 26, at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square; call (617) 876-7777.