If you only know jazz singers as big, brassy women who can hold a note until the room shakes, Blossom Dearie will throw you off. Her voice barely rises above a whisper half the time. But that smallness is the whole point. She picked songs that rewarded close listening — clever lyrics, odd rhymes, dry jokes — and delivered them like she was letting you in on a secret.

She started out singing with a vocal group in Paris in the early 1950s and had a minor hit there with a French version of "Lullaby of Birdland." That got her noticed back in the States, and Norman Granz signed her to Verve, where she made Blossom Dearie (1957), a record that set the template for everything after: her own piano, a light trio behind her, and a voice that sounded like it was sitting right next to you rather than performing for you.

The songwriter Dave Frishberg became her perfect match. He wrote her sly, witty material — songs like "I'm Hip" and "Peel Me a Grape" — built for exactly her kind of understatement. These weren't torch songs or showstoppers. They were little character studies, delivered with a wink, and nobody else could have sold them the same way.

By the 1970s she'd had enough of labels telling her what to record, so she started her own, Daisy Records, and ran it herself for decades. That's not a small thing for a singer of her era — most artists, especially women, didn't get that kind of control. She wasn't chasing a mass audience. She had a devoted one, and she kept it fed on her own terms.

She also has a strange footnote most jazz fans don't expect: she sang several of the songs on Schoolhouse Rock, including "Unpack Your Adjectives" and "Figure Eight." An entire generation of American kids learned grammar from the same voice that was singing dry, grown-up jokes about romance in Greenwich Village supper clubs at night. That contrast tells you everything about her range — not vocal range, but the range of what she could do with a tiny, specific instrument and perfect taste.