E.J. Strickland starts by laying down a funk beat on his drums, into which the percussionist Lekan Babalola interweaves a combination of bongos, congas, cowbells, an African rhythm box, and other implements from all over the world. Meanwhile, bassist Reginald Veal, guitarist Marvin Sewell, and pianist Jonathan Batiste concentrate on one single function, which is to slowly stretch the tension of this rising vamp so that the entrance of the star singer will be even more dramatic. She waits a good long time to emerge, so that by the time we finally see her, we’re ready to scream. The vamp goes on and on, getting ever more intense. Then she finally appears, in high heels (soon to be kicked off) and an orange-and-yellow sundress, and just as she’s about to sing her first note — a bass amplifier behind her catches fire.

You’ve got to hand it to Cassandra Wilson: She certainly knows how to make an entrance.

This was Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Lichtenstein Theater, the final night of the Mississippi Delta Heritage Project, a month-long performance series produced by 651 Arts. It was also a coming-out party for Ms. Wilson’s 17th original solo album, “Loverly” (which is being celebrated again tonight at the Blue Note in Manhattan).

No flames were seen rising from the amp, but a profuse amount of smoke began to pour out of the thing, and those of us in the first few rows smelled burning rubber. The BAM technicians quickly unplugged the offending piece of machinery and whisked it offstage. In the end, the only casualty of the incident was Mr. Veal’s bass, which was essentially inaudible for most of the evening. If Ms. Wilson was aware of what had transpired behind her, she didn’t let on.

At one point during the evening, she remarked that it was good to be back in Brooklyn, which served as a reminder that context is everything. Ms. Wilson lived in the borough for most of the 1980s, which is when many jazz fans first heard her. At the time, she was regarded as the house vocalist with alto saxophonist and savant Steve Coleman’s M-Base Collective. The tendency was to associate Ms. Wilson with that collective’s “cutting-edge” and often highly abstract form of jazz.

Yet anyone who heard her sing earlier than that wouldn’t associate her with far-out or experimental sounds, but, conversely, with the most fundamental form of musical expression that we have: the blues. She was born (in 1955) and raised in Jackson, Miss., and grew up immersed in the Delta blues and soul music, and didn’t live in the North until her Brooklyn sojourn. Her recent projects, then, represent a dual homecoming: to Brooklyn for the BAM concert, and to Jackson, where she and her band rented a house and set up an informal studio to record “Loverly.”

Even though she only sings two straight blues numbers on the album (the standards “Dust My Broom” and “St. James Infirmary”), and added a third for the concert, Son House’s “Death Letter,” the blues is probably the single most crucial element of Ms. Wilson’s music. She is probably the only major jazz vocalist working today whose primary influence is the blues, which is as much a concept of interpretation as a musical form. In contrast to contemporary pop, where everybody is expected to write their own songs and not sing anyone else’s, the blues is essentially one single song that everyone is required to sing differently. Even something as concrete as pitch is not a given; one singer’s A flat is not the same as another’s, and Ms. Wilson’s highly personal intonation reflects the idea that pitch is yet one more option — not fixed but flexible.

Although she has yet to do a whole album of the blues (are you listening, Blue Note Records?), that concept informs everything else that Ms. Wilson does. This is why she can take some of the most overdone songs of all tme, such as “The Very Thought of You” and “Caravan,” and make the listener feel as though he’s never heard them before. Granted, there are trillions of so-called jazz singers out there who feel it is a moral imperative to take famous melodies and distort them beyond recognition.

But when Ms. Wilson changes a tune, like Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and, at her best, Betty Carter before her, it may not improve the original, but I want to hear it just the same. Ms. Wilson brings to the Great American Songbook the same degree of inventiveness and musicality that the best blues singers are expected to have.

“Loverly” is only her second original album of standards, arriving on the 20th anniversary of the previous one, “Blue Skies.” Likewise, Saturday’s performance at BAM was the first show of hers I’ve seen that didn’t include any entirely original songs; the closest was her opener, her lyrics to Miles Davis’s “Run the Voodoo Down.” Otherwise, she put her emphasis on standards such as “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Gone With the Wind,” and “A Day in the Life of a Fool,” all songs with an African or Southern association.

Although it wasn’t recorded in front of an audience, the new album is the one by Ms. Wilson that best captures what she’s like in performance. She moves about the stage while she’s singing, and even more so while the instrumentalists are soloing. On “Caravan” one could hear her cuing the rhythm section for her re-entrance (“here we go”), and on “The Very Thought of You,” she moved toward the microphone from one end of the room to another. Picturing her doing the same in her Mississippi studio lends the album a gloriously spontaneous feel.

The co-stars of the album are the pianist Jason Moran and Marvin Sewell, her longtime guitarist, whom she now introduces as her musical director. Even as Ms. Wilson phrases more and more like an instrument, Mr. Sewell’s instrument sounds more and more like a human voice — wailing, whining, moaning, using non-tempered pitches and blue notes to create a unique expression.

“Loverly” is nearly perfect, but the concert was marred not only by audio misadventures (a shame, because the Harvey Lichtenstein is a singularly beautiful theater) but by the star’s decision to feature another performer, Rhonda Richmond, a singer-songwriter whom Ms. Wilson has produced. Ms. Richmond is talented and she would have been welcome at the beginning of the show, but Ms. Wilson brought her on at the apex of the evening, just when we wanted to hear more of her. She sang only seven songs all evening. The move was distinctly anticlimactic, but perhaps it was entirely in keeping with the overall approach of Ms. Wilson, who persists in presenting herself as the total anti-diva — bare feet, burning amps, and all.

wfriedwald@nysun.com