During a career that has lasted roughly 25 years and 11 albums so far, René Marie has released one “tribute” album, 2013’s “I Wanna Be Evil: With Love to Eartha Kitt.” It was an excellent choice: Ms. Marie is unquestionably in tune with Kitt’s legendary high style, self-effacing humor, and Eartha-y sensuality. This is a jewel of an album, not least for her seductively Middle Eastern-style reimagining of “Come On-A My House.” 

Yet if there’s one legendary diva that René Marie reminds us of, it’s actually Nina Simone — though, ironically, Ms. Marie seems to be one of the only contemporary singers around who has not done her own Nina Simone tribute album.

During a recent four-night run at Dizzy’s, Ms. Marie took a lot of the same ingredients that went into Simone’s music — jazz, blues, soul, folk, country and contemporary pop songs — and mixed them into her own highly compelling cocktail. Like Simone, and more than Kitt, Ms. Marie is very dark and seductive. While there’s an element of protest and a championing of social justice issues, at the same time there’s a refusal to take herself too seriously. 

About halfway through her career thus far, Ms. Marie made an all-important transition: having started as a singer of mostly jazz standards like “Them There Eyes” and “The Very Thought of You,” she gradually switched over to doing mostly originals, with only the occasional song that she didn’t write. 

This is not a move that I always approve of: For some reason, writing songs in a jazz idiom or for jazz singers has always been a kind of a minefield where more is likely to go wrong than right. For every Oscar Brown or Abbey Lincoln, there are about 200 self-sabotaging jazz singers who louse up their own careers by subjecting us to mediocre original music and lousy words.

Not Ms. Marie. Over the years I’ve been listening to her, she constantly renews my faith. In fact, she constantly upends the very concept of a standard song. A standard is something that can be, theoretically at least, sung by everybody, yet Ms. Marie’s songs seem so specifically intimate and so perfect for the singer herself that I am not certain I can wrap my head around the idea of anyone else performing them.  

Her most durable piece may be “Black Lace Freudian Slip,” the title song from her 2011 album. It’s a tale of seduction and sexual invitation in which the situation seems both real and imagined, direct and metaphoric, psychological and sensual. “You’ve come and paid your money to be entertained / Seeking some kind of inspiration from my pleasure and my pain.”  

One has no idea exactly what, if the perceived “listener” to the lyrics actually says “yes” to this offer, lies in store for him. She’s celebrating the mating dance while at the same time upending it. Her performance becomes even more personal when she includes a monologue about a moment when, as a little girl, she snuck into her mother’s lingerie drawer and tried some of it on. 

Ms. Marie began one of the sets with a song that wasn’t a jazz standard or an original, but something else entirely: a 1973 rock hit by Bob Seger, “Turn the Page” (which she sang on her 2007 “Experiment in Truth”). Here the subject is not the man-woman courtship ritual but the existence of a touring performer, and it’s way more bleak than it is upbeat. Accompanied only by bassist Elias Bailey, Ms. Marie’s interpretation is even darker than the original, and she makes it sound like so much her own story, the baring of her own soul, that it’s hard to believe somebody else wrote it.

Other songs are more upbeat, such as “I Like You” (from the 2000 “How Can I Keep from Singing?”), an old-fashioned swinging list song in the general style of “Better than Anything.” She also sang “Colorado River Song” (from her most recent album, the 2016 “Sound of Red”), which is cheerful and optimistic — almost like a very hip children’s song. It features an arco solo by Mr. Bailey in a bouncy 2/4; here it seems perfectly in character for her to whistle.

If there was a complaint about her Dizzy’s set — which also featured pianist Xavier Davis and drummer Quentin E. Baxter — it’s that it was too short. I wish she’d found time for “This is (Not) a Protest Song,” which has more of a folk-country feeling. She ended conclusively with another song from “Sound of Red,” “Lost,” introducing the latter as “inspired by someone I love very dearly, who had some challenges in their life.”  

“Lost” seemed to start as a samba and finish as a blues, at which point Ms. Marie quoted “Blues in the Night.” Yet despite the title and the change in direction, it didn’t seem lost at all. Like the rest of René Marie’s set, it knew exactly where it was going.