Kim Nalley "a joyful Billie Holiday"

Presented by Marin Jazz & The Lark Theater.

San Francisco vocalist Kim Nalley has distinguished herself internationally with a beguiling combination of sass, soul and smarts.

She’s a rare artist with the dramatic presence, stylistic breadth and technical skill to pay a fitting tribute to the legendary Billie Holiday, portraying Holiday in stage plays and in her own signature show, The Heart of Lady Day.

Throughout her notable career, Nalley has convincingly sung songs associated with the legendary jazz singer, doing saucy numbers like “Comes Love” with Johnny Nocturne’s jump-blues band in the 1990s and classics like “God Bless the Child” during her sold-out runs in recent years at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Describing Nalley as “full of sass, skill and authority,” DownBeat says she “embodies the spirit of Billie Holiday without ever losing her own artistic integrity.” A blues-loving jazz singer with a luxuriously rich voice, Nalley does Lady Day her way.

You don't need those gardenias in her hair to realize that her tuneful, buoyant, sexy and joyfully jazzy Rrazz Room debut is one helluva tribute to Billie Holiday.

That's right, joyful. Anyone looking for an evening with the cracked husk of a voice but still fine stylings of Holiday's final years will have to go elsewhere. Nalley's "The Heart of Lady Day," which opened Thursday, celebrates the young songbird who made her voice one of the greatest of jazz instruments.

Nalley is the woman for the job. A fine vocalist, she has the range - 3 1/2 octaves - to cover everyone from Bessie Smith, whose earthy tones infuse her version of a very, young Holiday on "'Taint Nobody's Business," to the vocal pyrotechnics of Ella Fitzgerald - as she does, hilariously, in her and Holiday's takes on "Fine and Mellow." And she performs with a generosity of spirit that embraces and energizes the entire audience.

The 90-minute Marin Jazz set is an abridged version of a longer tribute Nalley developed after playing the young Holiday in the play "Lady Day in Love." Thursday, she was still shaping the show on the fly, editing the song list as she went along.  It scarcely matters which songs get left out and which included. Every one Nalley and her band perform is a classic.

She doesn't imitate Holiday so much as channel her spirit - at its most spirited and musically inventive - whether in evoking the familiar swing from rapid phrasings to a long drawl, swooping from angelic highs to guttural low notes or delighting in a rapid scat duet with drummer Kent Bryson.

This is the Billie Holiday of my youth, the one who sang in the club downstairs when I was an infant in Greenwich Village and whose 78s were the soundtrack of my childhood.

Nalley makes her sing again.

- By Robert Hurwitt,Chronicle Theater Critic, SFGATE