Jack Jones is the last of the greatest generation of pop-jazz crooners. At 67 Mr. Jones is younger than either Elvis Presley or Bobby Darin would have been. He and Nancy Wilson (who is, in many ways, his female counterpart) represent the cutoff point; anyone who came along after them can be safely classified as a revivalist. Tonight Mr. Jones opens a two-week run at the Algonquin, his first important New York appearance in eight years.

Mr. Jones’s key strength is the Great American Songbook – jazzy swingers and heart-wrenching ballads. He is foremost a Frank Sinatra-style “swingin’ lover” – practically the only one of the postwar era who wasn’t Italian, African-American, or Jewish. With most of his living rivals, such as Vic Damone and Steve Lawrence, in retirement, he and his hero Tony Bennett are our strongest links to a golden era.

At his best, Mr. Jones combines the technique and vocal beauty of a well-trained classical singer with the rhythm and irreverence of a great popster. He seems to belong to both sides of the generation gap, or, at times, to eliminate it entirely – he made Cole Porter’s “You’re Sensational” into something like a hit, and did a whole album of lush orchestrations of Gershwin classics.

Yet Mr. Jones’s legacy has been compromised by choice of material. Over the years he has recorded so many cheesy songs – like the infamous theme from the “The Love Boat” – side by side with great ones, that I simply can’t blame all of these questionable choices on his producers. Sometimes I wonder if he knows the difference. A search for Jack Jones CDs on the Internet finds entries listed in both the “blues” and “folk” genres. His most memorable projects in the 1970s and 1980s were songbook albums, brilliant collections devoted to French composers Michel Legrand and Charles Aznavour. But during the same period he made a record called “Bread Winners,” in which he crooned the hits of the forgettable rock band Bread.

Mr. Jones grew up in the Hollywood-classical world of his father (most famous as the definitive leading man in the best film of “Show Boat,” as straight man for the Marx brothers in two movies, and for his hit “The Donkey Serenade”). A child of the 1950s, however, he was drawn to the sophisticated jazz-pop of Sinatra, Torme, and Mr. Bennett. He signed with Capitol Records, where, he told me a few years ago, “they tried to make me into what they thought was a rock ‘n’ roll singer, but it didn’t work, and I wasn’t really into it.” Nevertheless, producers would try it again at several points during his career.

He made one worthwhile LP for the label, “This Love of Mine,” a set of songs composed by famous singers. Its unfortunate cover depicted the young Jones in caveman drag, complete with puppet dinosaur and cave girl in fur bathing suit – an appropriate image for a great singer’s prehistoric period. When arranger Pete King brought Mr. Jones to Kapp Records, where he worked with producer Mickey Kapp, the young star broke through in a big way.

He was the golden boy of the 1960s, one of the few artists to repeatedly land both hit singles and big-selling albums. He was also almost embarrassingly prolific. In less than eight years, Mr. Jones released well more than 26 albums on Kapp. Then he switched to RCA, and recorded another 24 albums in a decade. Perhaps the sheer quantity of material has intimidated reissue producers; certainly few of his classic tracks are on CD.

In recent years, thankfully, British MCA has reissued six of his best early albums on three double length CDs: “She Loves Me / There’s Love & There’s Love & There’s Love” (19378), “Where Love Has Gone / My Kind of Town” (19391) and “Wives and Lovers / Dear Heart & Other Great Songs of Love” (19364). The 1963 “She Loves Me” may be his single greatest album: He reinterprets a dozen show tunes and standards in a blend of Brazilian bossa nova and West Coast cool jazz, with a singing style at the geo-musical midpoint of Broadway, Birdland, and Vegas.

In recent years Mr. Jones has been able to swing out extrovertedly, à la Sinatra. Back when he was 25, his singing was no less rhythmical but a bit more contained, the perfect combination of Sinatra and Torme, combining the presence of the first with the modernistic musicality of the second. No one but Jones, could take the 3/4 “Real Live Girl” and swing both the sarcasm and the schmaltz out of it. He was also the perfect age for songs written for Broadway juveniles, and his interjected asides in the title song “She Loves Me” (“what the heck does that mean?”) are completely convincing. He also expertly pulls off a series of modulations buried in the middle of wordless moans.

The last 40 years have deepened and hardened Mr. Jones’s voice somewhat, and his youthful naïvete has matured into more of a Rat Packish swagger (if I had his talent, I’d swagger, too), but he still possesses a remarkable instrument and knows how to use it. In 1966 he sang “The Impossible Dream” with a young man’s idealism. Now he sings it with the voice of experience and the conviction of an old campaigner, somewhat “covered with scars” but still not fully convinced the dream is as impossible as it’s cracked up to be.

Tonight-June 11 (59 W. 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-419-9331).