As a concept, minimalism is overrated. Most of the time, less is not more; less is actually less. But the pianist and singer Shirley Horn, who died Thursday night at the age of 71, was that rare musician who could squeeze the most music and emotion out of every precious note. In that sense, she was a maximalist, not a minimalist.

Like Count Basie, Horn employed as few notes as possible – never playing two notes when one would do, never sustaining any of them for two beats when one was sufficient. She knew that too many notes get in the way of one another, overpower one another. When she sang Johnny Mandel’s “Close Enough for Love” on her 1988 CD of the same title, she gave each gorgeous note plenty of room to resonate. Even when she employed a Latin rhythm, as on the song “How Am I To Know?” from the 1992 album “Here’s to Life,” she did so subtly and gently, and refused to let it overwhelm the whole piece.

Horn was not merely making a conceptual point, however. On occasion she did build to a loud climax – as on “Georgia on My Mind,” on her 1981 album “Violets for Your Furs.” We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that Horn did as little as she could get away with. Rather, she sang and played as much as she could, belted as loud as she could, and played as many breathtaking arpeggios as she felt the music would allow. She just didn’t think it would allow very much.

Horn eschewed the tricky arrangements so common today, which declare the so-called cleverness of the performer or arranger. “I think a ballad should be sung slow, I don’t think a ballad should be sung like a foxtrot,” she said, referring, in her old-school parlance, to a proper dance tempo. “That bugs me. If you’re going to do a foxtrot, do a foxtrot. Slow down and interpret the lyric and try to paint a picture, tell a story. If it’s a love song, do it that way.”

Horn was out of commission too much in recent years. In 2001, she lost Charles Ables, her bassist of the previous two decades, to cancer, and the following year lost one of her feet (and with it the ability to play the piano) to diabetes. So every appearance was special.

She played the Iridium and Carnegie Hall, sharing a bill with Dave Brubeck and in an all-star salute to one of her key influences, Peggy Lee, in 2003.And over the last 18 months or so, she made several appearances at Au Bar, sometimes backed by George Mesterhazy on piano, sometimes struggling to play herself, employing a prosthetic foot.

Equally precious were her occasional late recordings: 2000’s “You’re My Thrill,” the second of two remarkable orchestral albums she would cut with the prodigious orchestrator Johnny Mandel (the first was “Here’s to Life”), and 2003’s “May the Music Never End.”

Obviously mindful that Horn would not be able to make another recording, Verve Records, her label for the most rewarding part of her career, put together a compilation, “But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn on Verve” (4068), which was released only a week ago. The new package, officially produced by Horn herself, draws on seven of the 11 albums she made in her 18-year association with Verve.

The set opens, as Horn herself generally did, with a foxtrot. “I Just Found Out About Love” is rendered in a fraction of the speed with which it was swung by Nat King Cole, who rescued this jazzy Jimmy McHugh melody from a flop show. Yet it’s what passed for up-tempo in Horn’s world, and it’s certainly more exciting than anything belted or screamed or scatted by the most high-powered extroverts around.

From a medium-fast swinger to a medium-slow ballad, we come to one of the most celebrated tracks in her canon, the title cut to the 1990 album “You Won’t Forget Me.” This cut is frequently anthologized because of the presence of guest star Miles Davis. Thirty years earlier, the trumpet legend had been one of Horn’s early boosters, and he recruited her to open for him at the Village Vanguard.

Roughly a year before his death, Davis consented to appear with her on what was probably his final studio session. At the time, it seemed like the superstar Prince of Darkness was helping his one-time protegee; in retrospect, it was clearly the other way around. Horn was giving Davis a chance to show that he could still play beautifully on standard changes.

The “Best of” concludes with three tracks recorded at the Au Bar last January (and I hope more will be issued in the near future).There are two Richard Rodgers songs familiar to Horn fans: “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” costarring trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and “Loads of Love,” one of many numbers with comic overtones she would employ to give audiences a respite. Strangely, none of the three Au Bar numbers is one of those classic Horn torch songs; this subset opens with Billy Eckstine’s “Jelly, Jelly,” one of the strongest traditional 12-bar blues numbers that she ever sang.

Horn’s greatest moments were these slow love songs. Even at the end of her life, she could leave a crowd hanging on every note, every word, every pause, every inflection. We would be breathing along with her and feeling along with her.