Lainie Kazan
‘Lainie Kazan’ (1966)
‘Right Now!’ (1966)
‘Love Is Lainie’ (1967)
‘The Love Album’ (1967)

In 1964, Lainie Kazan was the most famous understudy in America, when she stood in for Barbra Streisand as Fannie Brice in the original Broadway production of “Funny Girl.” Even though Ms. Kazan is actually two years older than Ms. Streisand and “Funny Girl” was her third Broadway show, she is generally regarded as one of the young female singers who ascended to stardom in the wake of Ms. Streisand’s blockbuster success; Liza Minnelli and Lana Cantrell might also be regarded as part of that trend.

By 1966, when Ms. Kazan was appearing on every variety show on the air, including “The Bell Telephone Hour” and later “The Carol Burnett Show,” she was firmly a marquee name in her own right. In 1966 and ’67, she made four albums for MGM Records that all sold well at the time and ever since have been considered classics of the vocal idiom — equal parts pop, Broadway, and jazz. Even so, they’ve been hard to find, but streaming services have now made them available; hopefully a physical release will follow next year.

If Ms. Streisand provided something of a career template for Ms. Kazan, you could never confuse the two vocally — to my ears Ms. Kazan was much more influenced by two then-living legends, Judy Garland and especially Lena Horne. The way she belts and the way she purrs, the way she uses idiosyncratic distortions, and the way she blasts and chews up the musical scenery when appropriate are very much in the tradition of ’60s Lena. “Song Without Words,” an adaptation from a Jacques Brel chanson by Rod McKuen, is a spoken word piece, and on a blindfold test I would have guessed the voice was Horne’s.

Her first album, “Lainie Kazan,” begins with a swinger titled “I’m All Right Now,” by the lesser-known Joe Lubin, which starts in a somewhat laid back Basie-esque solid four, and grows steadily in volume and energy. A few tracks later, she dives into a mashup of “The Trolley Song” with “Gotta Have Me Go with You.” Even though both are part of the Garland canon, the approach is much more Lena than Judy; instead of going larger than life, she undersings at first, almost mumbling, as if to overstate the understatement.

“Gotta Have Me Go with You,” from “A Star is Born,” underscores how Ms. Kazan, no less than Garland, Horne, and Ms. Streisand, all enjoyed a particular affinity for the songs of Harold Arlen. The 1966 “Right Now!” album features two striking songs from the 1954 “House of Flowers,” one of the composer’s many less-than-successful shows with a well-above-average score, the title number and “Don’t Like Goodbyes.” Both are complicated, highly nuanced texts — rare forays into lyric writing by Truman Capote — that convey a highly mixed palette of frequently conflicting emotions. The heroine of “Don’t Like Goodbyes” is simultaneously excited and scared by what the future holds for her, and Ms. Kazan perfectly nails the moment.

Likewise, there’s “Take It Slow, Joe,” from Arlen’s other Caribbean musical, “Jamaica” (1957), in which Ms. Kazan, as distinct from many of the other new belters of her generation, again shows that she knows how to understate. Conversely, she turns in a very theatrical reading of Arlen’s “Blues in the Night.”

There are also three songs from the Gershwin masterpiece, “Porgy and Bess,” in which Ms. Kazan eases into something like a more formal soprano, especially on “My Man’s Gone Now,” which includes a wordless wail that’s equal parts Joan Sutherland, Eydie Gorme, and Sarah Vaughan. A minute or so in, the time signature shifts from 2/4 to something closer to a jazz waltz, and alternates between two and three / four for the rest of the track. Likewise, “Joey, Joey, Joey” starts out rubato in the verse and then finds itself in a swinging 6/4 for the chorus.

The 1967 album “Love is Lainie” includes two relatively lesser-known works by the highly successful team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, both of which are more topical and politically oriented than most of their more customary love songs, “The Windows of the World” and especially “They Don’t Give Medals (To Yesterday’s Heroes).” There are also lovely readings of two more familiar Bacharach-David classics, “A House is Not a Home” and “The Look of Love.”  

“Black, Black, Black,” arranged by her husband-to-be, Peter Daniels, is a topical update of the folk song “Black Is The Color of My True Love’s Hair,” done in roughly the style of Peggy Lee’s “Lover.” “Right Now” also includes “No More Songs For Me,” a beautifully bittersweet aria that represents a very early effort by the team of Richard Maltby and David Shire.

Although these four albums are Ms. Kazan’s best known, she had a huge future ahead of her at the end of the 1960s. In the next decade, she would become closely aligned with the Playboy organization, both as a model — perhaps its first and most famous openly Jewish pin-up — and as an entrepreneur who ran her own club within the Playboy clubs on both coasts.  In the 1980s, she became a character actress, with a breakthrough role as a Brooklyn balaboosta in the classic comedy “My Favorite Year,” and she has continued to play variations on that character in the “Big Fat Greek Wedding” franchise and “Desperate Housewives.”  

Famously, a legendary comic book artist and creator, Jack Kirby, based one of his superheroines on her. These four albums from the late ’60s remind us what all the excitement was about.