Mark Murphy is the standard-bearer for male jazz singers. His opening a run at Birdland is always news, but this week’s appearances are especially notable because of Mr. Murphy’s new album. That he has a new album is not in itself notable – it’s his seventh since 2000 – but “Once to Every Heart” (Verve 54760) is on a major label. It’s also an album of slow ballads with strings, something longtime fans have been clamoring for him to do for some time.

The project came about because of the German trumpeter Till Bronner. He decided he wanted to produce a new Murphy album – the kind that hasn’t been heard before. The one consistent factor in Mr. Murphy’s 50-year career is his diversity, from bebop and bossa nova to highly personalized ballad interpretations. Now Mr. Bronner has given him the chance to do something new.

Mr. Murphy has one original here, “I Know You From Somewhere.” A love song in the time-honored half-a-conversation format of “Guess Who I Saw Today?” and “Something Cool,” the piece moved me even before I heard Mr. Murphy’s introduction at Birdland. He wrote it in the immediate aftermath of September 11, depicting two people encountering each other again in this frightening new world.

Mr. Murphy has the good sense to feature original songs sparingly while concentrating on the Great American Songbook. There is no one better at taking a familiar song, turning it inside out, and finding the feeling underneath. He never reinterprets a song merely for the sake of being different, but to get at its inner meaning. By making you think differently about an old song, he makes it meaningful all over again.

At Birdland, as on the album, Mr. Murphy had the benefit of Mr. Bronner’s playing, along with a quartet of Misha Piatigorsky (piano), Max Vader (bass), Obed Calvair (drums), and Gilad (percussion). Mr. Bronner sounded a lot like Miles Davis on the great 1940 Rodgers and Hart showtune “It Never Entered My Mind.” He employed a harmon mute, patterning his playing after Davis’s famous 1954 recording, which in turn had been inspired by Frank Sinatra’s 1947 version.

His major showpiece on the album and at Birdland is “I’m Through With Love,” the 1931 Bing Crosby hit – known to subsequent generations courtesy of “The Little Rascals.” Mr. Murphy is a veritable quartet by himself. He starts in a straight-ahead chest voice, then drops down to a deep basso as he heads for the end of the first A section (and the first utterance of the title). Here he switches to a lacy filigree at “keep my feelings there,” and, for the end of the next A section, instead of diving low, as he’s got us expecting him to do, he goes way up high into falsetto. He concluded on Wednesday with a long, piercing head tone, but then reinforced the message by detouring through a spoken rap in which he further delineated just how through with love he is.

Mr. Murphy’s rap at the end of “I’m Through With Love” contains the admonition, “Love is a four letter word after all.” But he can’t fool us: After so many years of singing about it, he still believes in it. Mark Murphy is something the world could use more of: a hipster with heart.

wfriedwald@nysun.com