In her two sets at the Regattabar last Thursday (the first of a two-night engagement), jazz singer Patricia Barber offered singing and a whole lot more. She’s a sharp, literate songwriter, a superb jazz pianist, and a bandleader with a personal ensemble sound. Her vocals are what sell her, but to play only vocal arrangements would sell her, and her audience, short.

Consider the sheer range of material in her two Thursday sets. Besides a healthy sampling of originals from her new Blue Note album, Verse, she and her quartet covered Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa chestnut "Wave," Fats Waller’s "Jitterbug Waltz," the folk ballad "Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair," Duke Ellington & Juan Tizol’s "Caravan," Charles Mingus’s "Nostalgia in Times Square," Sammy Cahn & Jule Styne’s "I Fall in Love Too Easily," and Ben Bernie’s "Sweet Georgia Brown."

They gave each piece its special stamp, deploying dynamics and color as well as swing for their effects. Barber’s piano and Michael Arnopol’s bass providing much of the rhythmic and harmonic grounding; guitarist Neal Alger filled out the palette with delicate bent notes and off-beat chords that moaned and whined and explored the outer reaches of a tune’s harmonies. It came as a pleasurable shock when he finally played straight, Django-like swing on "Sweet Georgia Brown." Drummer Eric Montzka had a vast kit, but he used it, often very quietly, for tonal color as much as propulsion. The constant variation of tempos and time signatures impressed with its ensemble tightness and refreshed the ear, even on an old warhorse like "Caravan." Barber played the descending melody of "Jitterbug Waltz" as a beautiful, cleanly articulated cascade while gradually shifting accents in her left hand until the dance became a comic infernal machine.

And then there were those originals. Barber is drawn to pop and has declared Joni Mitchell to be a direct influence on Verse, but she’s also said she wants to write songs with the kind of complexity that will accommodate jazz soloists. In her own way, she’s adapting a contemporary sensibility to the song-form traditions of Styne and Cahn and Jobim. Her love songs are laced with acerbic verbal wit ("I could eat your words/Suck the salt from your ‘erudition’ "), and her dynamic shifts could end a number with just her voice — a vibratoless alto that’s at once cool and warm — over an unresolved chord, so that a couple of times the audience remained completely hushed for several seconds.