Near the end of her second set a week ago Thursday at Scullers, singer/songwriter/pianist Norah Jones announced that she and her band would be back to play at the House of Blues on January 29 — with a drummer. "So we’ll be a little more . . . peppy," she added, and the whole band cracked up. Jones does have a sense of humor, which is nice, because maybe the worst thing you could say about the Scullers set was that it wasn’t too peppy.

At 22, Jones is the big buzz in jazz right now. Her debut album, which is due from Blue Note next month, was produced by legendary old hand Arif Mardin (Aretha Franklin) and jazz crossover specialist Craig Street (Cassandra Wilson). And though it’s not part of her official press package, it’s also no secret that she’s a daughter of Ravi Shankar (though she was born in New York and raised in Texas by her mother).

At Scullers, Jones, with a bassist and guitarist, played non-jazz material with a jazz feel. Hank Williams’s "Cold Cold Heart" was quietly funky. Johnny Cash’s "A Little at a Time" was low-key and bluesy. Jones sang with natural, relaxed phrasing, curving one line of verse around the next, bending a syllable into three or four pitches with shades of blue. Her voice was a dark, dusty whisper colored by glottal bends and an occasional light vibrato.

The folk and country roots of the material were deepened by guitarist Adam Levy whenever he took the slide to his electric guitar or played with effects that whined and moaned and twanged in a suggestion of Bill Frisell’s high lonesome crossover of jazz and Americana. The band also played a few numbers by bassist Lee Alexander that, especially in a tune like "Lonestar," could have veered off at any moment into "Me and Bobby McGee." An occasional 2/4 lope in the rhythms didn’t dissuade the country connections either.

But Jones’s voice, her emphasis on medium and ballad tempos, and everything else about her presentation at Scullers was so small-scale that it was hard to hear what’s making savvy characters like Mardin and Blue Note’s Bruce Lundvall go ga-ga. Yes, her originals are smart, melancholy, "adult." And, yes, she is rather beautiful. Maybe her intimate style will have more presence on record. When she funked her way into Hank Williams, my first thought was how interesting her interpretation was. But before long, on this and other country numbers, I began to yearn for Hank — or any traditional country performer — to be up there singing his guts out.