Mary Stallings, ‘Songs Were Made to Sing’ (Smoke Sessions)
Appearing at and livestreaming from Smoke with the Emmet Cohen Trio through August 14

Mary Stallings has titled her latest album “Songs Were Made to Sing,” which famously is the opening line from “While We’re Young.” The singer, who turns 83 next week, sings it with unabashed joy (rare for an Alec Wilder song) and not a trace of irony (ditto).  

Throughout the album and during Thursday’s opening set of a four-night stand at Smoke, she had me pondering that notion. Yes, songs were made to sing, but which, when, and how? 

In trying to describe Ms. Stallings to a friend who had never heard her, I said she sounded halfway between Carmen McRae and Nancy Wilson. I’ll stick by that, but between the album and the Smoke set, another influence — and a somewhat surprising one at that — made itself known: that of Thelonious Monk.

There are two Monk tunes on “Songs Were Made to Sing,” but the smoking gun, pardon the expression, is “Sweet and Lovely.” When Monk made this one of his go-to standards in the 1950s and ’60s, most observers chalked it up to characteristic Monkian perversity.  Here was a 1931 pop song associated with the dance bands and crooners of the era, and surely Monk was making a defiant point that his music was neither sweet nor, in the conventional sense, lovely.

Yet when Ms. Stallings sang “Sweet and Lovely” at Smoke, accompanied by the sure-footed piano of Emmet Cohen, she did something extraordinary: She followed the general contours and the tempo of Monk’s famous 1965 solo performance of the song, and yet she also poured the sweetness and loveliness back into the song even while retaining its Monkishness. Ms. Stallings and Mr. Cohen stretched it out and, like many of the songs on her set, emphasized its bluesy qualities, including those unexpected and iconic rests and fermatas, even while they invested it with remarkable warmth. 

The album also includes what is by far Monk’s most-sung song, “Round Midnight,” one of the few with a lyric of which he actually seems to have approved. At the opposite end of the generational spectrum, my two youngest favorite singers, Samara Joy (24) and Anais Reno (18), have been performing a version that incorporates the alternate lyric (“Tears I’ve shed today…”). Ms. Stallings, who sings the more familiar words (“It begins to tell…”), is assisted especially by trumpeter Eddie Henderson — apparently they’ve known each other since high school in San Francisco in the mid-1950s. 

Rather than slow it down to a crawl, Ms. Stallings and her pianist here, David Hazeltine, keep it moving, which is a blessing — there’s always a temptation with this song to sing it so slowly you feel like the singer won’t be finished until well after midnight.

When the singer described the newly reopened Smoke as “so beautiful, so pretty,” she could have also been talking about both her face and her voice. At the opening set, Ms. Stallings sang notable interpretations of the two minor-key jazz standards by Bernice Petkere. “Close Your Eyes” is an uptempo lullaby that she delivered with considerable energy. “Lullaby of the Leaves” was effectively, in this case, slowed down to a glacial tempo, mostly her voice with only Mr. Cohen’s piano, which effectively transformed a familiar lyric into what seemed like a genuinely personal experience of the vagaries of nature.

The Smoke set also included a mashup of “Try a Little Tenderness” and “Girl Talk,” both reconfigured as blues-y soul ballads; here, Mr. Cohen’s piano reminded me of Ray Bryant, Herman Foster, and other long-gone keyboard giants who really knew how to play the blues behind a singer. Mr. Hazeltine does likewise on the album, on which the most intimate moment is a voice-and-piano duo on “Give Me the Simple Life.” It is the paean to simplicity that it’s always been, and Ms. Stallings adds a profoundly spiritual dimension.

She makes her point about songs being made to sing. “Stolen Moments” has been ill-served by singers ever since Mark Murphy, talented as he was, recorded it with a rather awkward lyric (the phrase “useless bum” is a tipoff); thankfully, Ms. Stallings has procured a new set of words that better suit Oliver Nelson’s classic.

Throughout, Ms. Stallings serves up so much sweetness, loveliness, and bluesy-ness that she pushes aside some other thorny issues.  Abbey Lincoln introduced her lyric to “Blue Monk” in 1961 and it was later canonized, as it were, by Carmen McRae on what has become the definitive Monk songbook collection, “Carmen Sings Monk” (1990).  Even after hearing many singers do it since then, though, I still can’t make heads or tails of the words. 

It’s almost as if Lincoln wanted to take Monk’s most straightforward tune — a basic blues in B flat — and retrofit it with the most bafflingly complex verbal narrative she could devise. Lines like “Monkery’s the blues you hear” continue to leave me scratching my bald head, but Ms. Stallings sings Lincoln’s lyrics with such compassion (“Goin’ alone, life is your own, / But sometimes the cost is dear”) that it doesn’t matter. 

It certainly sounds like she cares very deeply about something, and that’s all that matters.