Mel Brooks, doing his 2,000-year-old-man shtick, neatly summed up everything that’s wrong with French music. “It’s too repetitive,” he said, repeating the phrase a few dozen times. He then showed how the charge applies across the spectrum of Gallic sounds from Ravel to Jacques Brel. No wonder French jazzmen, from Django Reinhardt to Michel Petrucciani, almost never have played chansons, preferring American popular songs instead.

Dee Dee Bridgewater, now opening a two-week run at Howard Stein’s Au Bar, is the first major American jazz singer I can think of to tackle a whole program of French songs. Her album, “J’ai Deux Amours” (“Two Loves Have I”), will be released in France shortly (although it’s not known when it will be out in the United States).

Ms. Bridgewater is the perfect jazz singer to make such an album. She was the first major American singer to relocate to Paris since Josephine Baker. It’s also perfectly natural for her to take Baker’s theme song as her title. To make the songs even more understandable, even to non-French-speaking imbeciles such as moi, she has concentrated on songs that have well-known English lyrics.

At Au Bar, she’s backed by her usual rhythm section of Ira Coleman (bass), Patrick Manougian (guitar), and Minio Garay (percussion), as well as accordionist Mark Berthoumieux. She often sings both sets of words – not that any text is necessary for Ms. Bridgewater, who sings with body language as much as lyrics. Her meaning is explicit no matter what dialect she employs – her shoulders, her hips, her derriere – or even when she’s scatting.

Starting on Wednesday with Baker’s double-national anthem “J’ai Deux Amours,” Ms. Bridgewater and her quartet made their point immediately, especially when Mr. Berthoumieux sang the words and Ms. Bridgewater hummed an Adelaide Hall-like obligato behind him. Most French tunes are too minor, too minimal, and, yes, too repetitive to travel very well. But Ms. Bridgewater opens them up, shifting parts to major keys, augmenting their chord sequences, and saturating them all with bebop energy and pan-African polyrhythms. (The latter were provided by Mr. Garay, who uses a combination of South American shakers and gourds and North American traps, often simultaneously.)

Ms. Bridgewater sounded great with Charles Trenet’s two international hits “La Mer” (“Beyond the Sea”) and “Que Rest t-il de Nos Amours” (“I Wish You Love”). This was no surprise, as Trenet was virtually the only Frenchman to write upbeat, peppy melodies that could have passed for American. She completely knocked me out, however, by animating “Ne me quitte pas” (“If You Go Away,” a characteristically dismal dirge by Jacques Brel, the single most undermelodic and overrated French composer. Ms. Bridgewater made it sound impassioned without snarling it, the way almost everyone does.

Ms. Bridgewater zinged into “Mon Homme” (“My Man,” introduced here by Fanny Brice and also associated with Billie Holiday) with an aggression that completely undercut the song’s traditionally masochistic message (she omitted the line “he isn’t true/he beats me too”). She did the same favor for an American “politically incorrect” lyric, Neal Hefti’s “Girl Talk,” in which she juxtaposed the original words by Bobby Troup with a new French text by Claude Nougaro. She also swung familiar Frankish airs by Sascha Distel, Gilbert Becaud, and Edith Piaf. The only internationally known French composers absent were, oddly, Charles Aznavour and Michel Legrand.

Ms. Bridgewater does a full two-hour show, and while I wouldn’t want to see her cut down any vocals, some of her longish spoken intros could be trimmed, as well as some of the long bass and drum vamps that lead into songs. Encore!

Until April 17 (41 E. 58th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-308-9455).