Standards and more: McGarry delights

"Can the target straighten the eye of the archer?" Kate McGarry sang to the Friday evening crowd at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At the other end of Great Stair Hall, bow and arrow in hand, stood a 19th-century sculpture of the goddess Diana. Pure coincidence. But if aligning the aural and visual arts is the mission of the museum's Art After 5 concert series, the moment was perfect.

McGarry embodies a new breed of jazz vocalist. She's an interpreter of jazz standards, but also music by Joni Mitchell and Björk. And she's a songwriter herself. "The Target (Miracles Like These)" is the title track from her new Palmetto release. Dark and flowing, it's a vivid example of her integrated jazz and pop sensibility.

Fronting an exceptional New York-based group with an hour-long set, McGarry covered improvisatory swing with Jerome Kern's "Nobody Else But Me" and Cole Porter's "Why Shouldn't I?" She rendered Rodgers & Hammerstein's "It Might As Well Be Spring" and the Troup/Worth classic "Meaning of the Blues" with an ethereal modernism. Alone with pianist Gary Versace, she sang "The Heather on the Hill" from Lerner & Loewe's Brigadoon.

Reveling in her folk/pop side, McGarry offered her own "Going In," from an earlier release called Mercy Street. Framed by simple acoustic guitar chords, it's a song of love, hope and risk: "Tie a rope around my waist and make it tight / I'm going in / through the small space in his eyes where I know I saw some light."

Versace's organ and Keith Ganz's guitars lent the music a dynamic, richly varied sonic signature, propelled by bassist Sean Smith and drummer Allison Miller.

McGarry's voice exuded tenderness, but her agility was tough as nails. Navigating an intricate unison passage with Ganz on "No Wonder," a piece by her contemporary Luciana Souza, she was more than a singer. In fine jazz tradition, she was an instrumentalist.