This week in New York, the air abounds in divas, what with Ann Hampton Callaway and the 14-piece all-female Diva Jazz Orchestra performing at the Blue Note and Andrea Marcovicci opening a new show at the Algonquin.

When Ms. Callaway took the stage on Tuesday, she started by recalling another threenamed Chicagoan, Nat King Cole. Like Cole, Ms. Callaway has made a gradual and deliberate evolution from a pianist-singer to a stand-up headliner. But where Cole’s later success was predicated mainly on his ability to sing ballads, Ms. Hampton’s work as a stand-up singer, especially in this context, is driven almost entirely by brassy, uptempo, hard-hitting swingers.

At the Blue Note, Ms. Callaway piled one show-stopping flag-waver after another, each more exciting than the next: “The Man I Love,” “Lover, Come Back to Me,” and two worthy originals, “Swingin’ Away the Blues” and “Hip To Be Happy.” Even when she sang slower pieces like “Come Rain or Come Shine” (an arrangement informed by Ray Charles and Ralph Burns) and “Time After Time,” they seemed merely a respite from her loud-andfast blasters. Perhaps she is saving her intimate ballads for a traditional cabaret room – as she correctly observed, many customers in the Blue Note don’t speak English in any case.

In her combination of tastefully applied scat, heartfelt lyric interpretation, and amazing musicality, Ms. Callaway seems predominantly inspired not by any member of the diva pantheon, but the late Mel Torme.And like Torme, she has no shortage of stagecraft.

Ms. Callaway’s “Kumbaya-Sunrise, Sunset” moment, as she put it, is her spontaneous composition of a song stitched together from random verbal phrases thrown at her by the crowd. Tuesday’s song involved “cabbage,” “Liza Minnelli” “New York Yankees,” and “transit strike.” I’ve heard her do this bit at least four times in the last 12 months, and it never ceases to amuse. Even her warm-up to the bit, in which she combines crashing flat notes with an Islamic chant, is a surefire crowd pleaser.

The Diva Jazz Orchestra had torn into the opening set by performing instrumental versions of two songs from the Peggy Lee book, “Love Being Here With You” and “I’m Gonna Go Fishing,” the latter having begun life as Duke Ellington’s theme from “Anatomy of a Murder.” The divas’ wild treatment added a thundering bass line and put it in 6/4 (or was it 6/8?), thus merging “Fishin'” with Charles Mingus’s “Better Git Hit in Your Soul.”

In between the two standards, the band essayed “You Didn’t Do That,” an original blues by founder Stanley Kaye. The piece was essentially a two-tenor battle between Anat Cohen and Scheila Gonzalez. I leave it to others to discuss the cultural implications of a Cohen battling a Gonzalez, but I have rarely seen women exhibit such aggression – except in Greek tragedy.

I had hoped the Divas would play one more instrumental after Ms. Callaway’s set, but it was not be.Which put me in a quandary: I wanted to hear more of them, but not less of her.

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The Blue Note is the perfect setting for Ms. Callaway’s brassy, swinging sound. Likewise, the Oak Room – warm and intimate and very personal – informs the mood of Andrea Marcovicci’s new show, “Andrea Sings Astaire.”

Ms. Marcovicci is in the upper echelon of her generation of cabaret singers. Like her contemporaries Michael Feinstein and Mary Cleere Haran, she weaves song and back story into a seamless tapestry of narrative. Like Astaire, Ms. Marcovicci loves songs with verses, because they help tell a story and heighten the suspense as she moves from unfamiliar verse to familiar chorus. Unlike Astaire, Ms. Marcovicci’s strong suits are hardly swing and syncopation, and some of the high notes and trickier melodies elude her. The meaning of the songs, however, does not.

I dare say I’ve watched and listened to and read as much about Fred Astaire as Ms. Marcovicci, but I knew she would come up with at least a few facts new to me and do a song or two I hadn’t heard before, at least in this century. When she neared the end of the verse to “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain),” she rolled her head backward and cast her eyes skyward, as if luck were indeed raining from the heavens. Certainly I felt it was the luckiest day I’ve known.

wfriedwald@nysun.com