Dorothy Fields was one of the great wordsmiths of the jazz age, and before Harold Arlen, she was the white, Jewish songwriter most associated with black showbiz (including the “Black Birds” shows on Broadway and the Cotton Club revues in Harlem). The 92nd Street Y’s Centennial Salute to Dorothy Fields was an example of the songbook concert format at its best.

Most such recitals of a songwriter’s work are centered around cabaret singers, and that’s both their strength and their weakness. This is fine if you’re doing Stephen Sondheim or Jacques Brel, but many of the great composers of the 1930s and 1940s wrote pop music that was equal parts jazz, and thus demands vocalists who can at least sing in time. Thankfully, Fields’s biographer, Deborah Grace Winer, who produced and hosted the concert, found three star singers who are not rhythmically challenged.

The principle performers were Karen Ziemba, Julie Wilson, and pianist-singer Billy Stritch. The backing trio featured superb, contemporary arrangements by John Oddo, working with the same rhythm combination used by Rosemary Clooney, Michael Feinstein, and Barbara Carroll, namely bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Joe Cocuzzo.

Ms. Ziemba, the Broadway star who distinguished herself in “Never Gonna Dance,” the 2003 musical that featured many Fields songs, was outstanding in last season’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie!” at Encores! And she is primarily a dancer, and thus more familiar than most musical theater artists with the concept of time.

Saturday night she had the responsibility here of doing both the big dramatic highlight and the big comedy highlight of “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” – namely, “Make The Man Love Me” and “Refinement.” Yet she is an even better dancer, and earned her biggest reaction strutting and wiggling with a Fosse-esque gait on “Hey Big Spender.” I felt somewhat cheated that the format didn’t allow her do a full dance number.

Ms. Wilson is a star diva often linked to the great East Side tradition of Mabel Mercer, but she, too, is at home in a jazz setting. Ms. Wilson, who recently turned 80, remains the queen of all cabaret divas, and still has style and class to spare. She was as impressive as ever in a mini-set of three early hits by Fields and Jimmy McHugh, including the triple-rhyming torch song, “I Must Have That Man.”

After Ms. Wilson sang the line “Blame your Kiss,” in “Don’t Blame Me,” tenor saxophonist Mark Vinci responded with a lusty obligato and she ad-libbed “Oh, what a kiss!” Ms. Wilson never had much of a range, and even when she mostly talks the words to “Remind Me,” she still seems supremely musical. Mr. Oddo, mindful that Fields and Jerome Kern wrote it for a picture called “A Night in the Tropics” (Abbott and Costello’s Hollywood debut), gave the 1940 song an undulating tropical lilt. When she started the verse with the line, “Turn off that charm,” everyone in the house was thinking, “not likely.”

Finally, Billy Stritch is part of the cabaret world, too, but such an outstanding keyboardist that he is a better jazz pianist than many full-time jazz pianists. He was assigned the deceptively simple lyric and melody of “I’m in the Mood for Love.” The main part of each A section is essentially a descending diatonic scale, and he also embellished this line with a Latinish rhythm.

Mr. Stritch was on-target in his solos, rolling his eyes on the phrase “Virgin isle” in “Diga Diga Do” (a song rarely held up as an example of great lyric writing) and gazing upwards on “if there are clouds above” in “Mood For Love.” He didn’t have much chemistry with either Ms. Ziemba or Ms. Wilson in his duets with them, but he did in a vocal duet with bass player Jay Leonhart on “Pick Yourself Up,” inspired by an arrangement that Mr. Leonhart played zillions of times with the late Mel Torme.

When I left the Mack Gordon Lyrics and Lyricists tribute in February, I lamented that it didn’t have any vocalists who could swing. This time they all could. I was disappointed, however, that there wasn’t one great lyric balladeer, like Sylvia McNair or Rebecca Luker, who could sing the hell out of Fields’s great love songs. You just can’t please some people.