Carol Sloane, ‘Live at Birdland’ (Club 44 Records) 
With Mike Renzi, piano; Scott Hamilton, tenor saxophone; Jay Leonhart, bass.

The jazz singer Carol Sloane is leaving the door a little open. True confession: When she played Birdland in September 2019, I hesitated to go. I may be the world’s biggest Carol Sloane fan, but she was then 82 and hadn’t played New York in at least five years. 

What’s more, her most recent album had been released almost 10 years earlier, and though it was a fine album, it bore an ominous title: “We’ll Meet Again” (2010, Arbor’s Jazz). That sounds like something you’d say or sing when you mean just the opposite, that we’ll probably never see each other again, at least not in this world.

My fears were unfounded, thank goodness, as Ms. Sloane sounded as great as ever in 2019. I again confess I had similar apprehensions when putting on her newly released CD, “Live at Birdland,” taped during the same engagement. (I’m probably in the house.)  

So much has happened since 2019, even beyond Covid. Jim Gavin’s excellent liner notes inform us that the two most important men in her life, her husband, Buck Spurr, and her longtime accompanist and collaborator, Mike Renzi, both passed away in between the release of those two albums.

Hearing the recording allayed all my fears: Her voice is as soft, sweet, and pliable as ever — if anything she sings with more grace and subtlety. She’s always cited Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae as her most important inspirations, and I have on occasion mistaken her for those two. That of course is a compliment, but I think it’s a greater strength that she now sounds more like Carol Sloane than ever before.

For the live album, Ms. Sloane and Renzi are joined by two other longstanding co-adjutants, bassist Jay Leonhart and the outstanding tenor saxophone balladeer Scott Hamilton. As a quartet, they shine on “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” which is an uptempo number only by comparison to the rest — there’s nothing extremely fast here. Everything is done with attention to the melody, the lyrics, and the larger meaning, at least as Ms. Sloane perceives it, of the song.  

In this case, she communicates extreme confusion if not outright craziness — or perhaps rather that her inherent sense of musical logic comes through even when she’s being driven crazy. This song also includes a brief scat episode and an extended, apparently improvised cadenza for a finale. Both also seem more logical than crazy.

“Two for the Road,” as Ms. Sloane correctly avers in her intro, is better than the 1967 Stanley Donen film it was written for. She and Renzi take the whole first chorus by themselves, but Renzi and Mr. Hamilton enter amazingly subtly at this point, like a pair of thieves in the night. They do the same on “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” which comes immediately after a chorus of “Glad to Be Unhappy,” upon which Mr. Hamilton reproduces Ms. Sloane’s vocal timbre so accurately it’s almost like he’s a second singer.  

Messrs. Leonhard and Hamilton both play only when they can add something, and a great deal of the album is just Ms. Sloane and Renzi, essentially in business for themselves. “If I Should Lose You” is primarily just the two of them, and this particular voice-and-piano duet is especially exquisite.  

I was thinking that “Two for the Road” should’ve been the closer, but no, “I’ll Always Leave The Door A Little Open” serves that purpose even more appropriately.  Both are ironic reminders of the doors that are currently closing all around us, considering that one of the writers of each of these beautiful songs — Leslie Bricusse in the first case and Johnny Mandel in the second — both perished in the pandemic.  

The only thing I don’t enjoy about “Carol Sloane Live at Birdland” is the occasional self-deprecating references to her age during her onstage patter. Just the opposite, Ms. Sloane’s advanced age is a major virtue that empowers her to cut to the emotional and musical core of everything she sings. Maybe you have to be 82 to sing about youth. Maybe you need to have seen “lovers and comrades” (in Walt Whitman’s phrase) go before you in order to really appreciate connection. Maybe you have to experience doors closing before you can fully fathom what it means to leave them a little open.  

Whatever the case, Carol Sloane has delivered an arrestingly moving album that I intend to keep listening to until I’m at least 82 or 85, should I be lucky enough to make it.