Without having done a formal survey, I would bet that most long-time fans of the singer (and occasional pianist) Ann Hampton Callaway first grew to love her because of what she could do with tender, intimate ballads like “Time After Time” and “Lush Life.”

During the 15 years or so that I have been listening to her, however, Ms. Calloway has grown increasingly extroverted. The bulk of her act is comprised of wild, up-tempo blasters and extravagant scat features — even with just a trio behind her (Ted Rosenthal on piano, Jay Leonhart on bass, and Victor Lewis on drums), she has become, in essence, a one-woman big band.

As she shows this week at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the first week of the Diet Coke Women in Jazz Festival, Ms. Callaway also brings a cabaret feeling to a jazz room, not necessarily in a musical sense, but in the way she constantly interacts with the audience. Jazz musicians tend to interact only with each other and sometimes even block out the crowd (Miles Davis even made a show of turning his back on the house). Ms. Callaway’s show is as much about the spaces between the songs as the songs themselves. She increasingly reminds me of the late Mel Torme, as when she does his arrangement of “Pick Yourself Up.” She has found a transparent, seamless way to blend first-rate music and first-class shtick, incorporating gags and routines both inside and outside the tunes themselves. She is wildly, exuberantly, entertaining — and she even finds time for a love song now and then.

Ms. Callaway also recalls Torme in that she is a talented writer of songs, both words and music, and does most of her arrangements by herself or in collaboration. Her opening show, on Wednesday, was mostly drawn from her new album, “Blues in the Night” (her first for Telarc).

She began with an original bright bouncer, “Swingin’ Away the Blues,” which betrayed her ability to compose in the classic style; apart from a few modern chords, it could have been written in the late 1950s. She also offered an original dedicated to the venue, a jingle called “Dizzy’s,” which is catchy (and rhymes “jazz” and “alcohol us” with “Wynton Marsalis”) but unlikely to take a place next to “Lullaby of Birdland.”For a third original in a row, she put words to a tune composed by the fine pianist Barbara Carroll in memory of the late Bill Evans, who died 26 years ago this week. Titled “Too Soon,” it is in every aspect — words, music, chord changes, time signature (3/4), and even the title — a direct extension of Evans’s most famous composition, “Waltz for Debby.”

Staying in a medium-slow tempo but switching back to 4/4, she essayed Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love.” This was highlighted by a wordless sequence that, again recalling Torme, was partially pre-composed and partially improvised on the spot, but entirely within the chords that have inspired so many musicians. Her most outstanding slow ballad of the evening is Stephen Sondheim’s “No One Is Alone” from “Into the Woods” (very much in the same vein as his more famous “Not While I’m Around”). Touching as it was, it’s easy to see why she does fewer and fewer of these, particularly on opening night — it’s not easy to instill an intimate mood in the midst of the party atmosphere.The ballads work better on the CD, rather than in the midst of all this revelry.

But a positive development in Ms. Callaway’s music is her increasing interest in the blues, a genre especially well represented on the new album. Not enough contemporary jazz vocalists sing the blues anymore, preferring pop or folk or world music. In contrast to ballads, the blues, which are tailormade for audience interaction, work especially well with a lively crowd. Yet singing the blues can be a slippery slope for a 21st Century performer, especially a white one.The temptation is always to overdo it, to affect a pseudoblack style by piling on too many faux-gospel mannerisms, and wind up singing like one of the wannabes on “American Idol.”

Ms. Callaway takes it as far as it can go without going overboard on “Blue Moon,” delivered in the style of Etta James rather than Ella Fitzgerald. On a medley of two Arlen-Koehler weather songs, “Stormy Weather” and “When the Sun Comes Out,” she and her special guest, her sister, the musical theater singer Liz Callaway, push the blues mannerisms right to the edge and possibly just over. However, on Arlen’s “Blues in the Night,” Ms. Callaway lays it on way too thick. Yet on the album, she makes fun of this tendency with the funniest original I have yet heard from her, “The I’m-Too-White-to-Sing-the-Blues Blues,” on which she humorously makes the point that white people can’t sing the blues. At various times in the live show, she both proves and disproves this widely held belief.

The Wednesday show included some of her familiar vaudeville shtick (like that of Torme, no matter how many times I’ve heard it, I never tire of it), her “Diva Blessing,” and her bit in which she spontaneously cobbles together a somewhat surreal song from random phrases shouted out by the crowd; this one included images of Dame Edna and Billie Holiday encountering jellyfish on the beach. If there’s a more entertaining performer currently working in New York, I have yet to hear her.

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This Sunday at 7 p.m., there is a benefit concert for one of my own mentors and spiritual fathers, the historian and cornetist Richard M. Sudhalter, whose books (particularly “Bix: Man and Legend” and “Lost Chords”) are an essential part of any jazz education, and who is battling the effects of a stroke and of multiple system atrophy. The concert will take place at St. Peter’s, and the leading attractions, along with the two organizers — the clarinetist Dan Levinson and the trumpeter Randy Sandke — are the outstanding Canadian guitarist and singer Jeff Healey, the pianistsinger Daryl Sherman, and the full Loren Schoenberg big band. It promises to be an outstanding event for a man who has made an outstanding contribution to jazz.