Jazz folkie Melody Gardot brings compassion, social conscience to new 'Currency'

Onetime Philadelphian Melody Gardot, a jazz folkie with a Billie Holiday-like quiver to her voice, had a personal misfortune that might have spelled the end of a music career.

Now 30, the pianist, then a fashion major at Community College of Philadelphia, was struck by a sport-utility vehicle in 2003, an accident that shattered her pelvis and left her with extreme photosensitivity, as well as autonomic nervous system dysfunction that makes her hypersensitive to loud noise.

It's hard not to read that backstory into the quirky calm of Gardot albums - spare, reedy efforts like 2008's Worrisome Heart and 2009's My One and Only Thrill, or the lush, samba-inflected The Absence of 2012.

Asked whether she's tired of talking about the accident and its scars, Gardot says: "History is a part of everyone's life. I highly doubt Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder woke up every day remembering first they were blind. Life is what it is. My history helps other people in terms of treatment and lessons in recovery. It affects my daily routine, as my body is not the same as someone who has not had that kind of a situation, but only adds to the joy once the challenge of overcoming physical pain is met."

Overcoming travails is what makes her new album, The Currency of Man, singular in Gardot's canon. It steps out of personal troubles and assumes the role of passionate and compassionate observer. She can be a Los Angeles street-corner diarist like the Tom Waits of Small Change (she has spent a lot of time in L.A., recording Currency there with producer Larry Klein), with an added sense of ironic justice ("It Gonna Come"), and occasional leaps into the socially conscious, as with "Preacherman."

Her mother was a photographer, and the young Gardot bounced around a little before going to school in Philadelphia. After she found success and began to tour, she learned how to travel light - and found herself doing so through constantly shifting environments.

"I live out of my suitcases," she says. "It makes for the best aperitif in terms of spice of life. One cannot advance as a compassionate human being by continuing to do the same thing, living the same way." Travel taught her respect for other cultures and gave her the thirst to understand them. She's unusually cosmopolitan for an American singer: "I know my roots as a citizen are in the U.S., but as Gertrude Stein said, 'America is my country, but Paris is my hometown.' "

She never does the same thing twice. The Latin/Brazilian feel of Absence gave way to Currency and its West Coast soul/jazz with a touch of gospel, not unlike Dusty Springfield's singing for Little Feat. Of the process of making Currency, Gardot says: "It's a bit like making a photograph. The result of the image, once clicked, depends upon how you are processing things and who is working alongside you."

She and Klein recorded live on tape, rather than digitally. They also added an essential field-recording vibe, à la Alan Lomax. This is "laced in so to give you an image of each character's world." You feel a new direction in her lyrics, something less directly personal and poetic, more plainspoken and observational. Perhaps she was just sick of talking about herself. The people and situations of the world at large suddenly seemed more crucial to discuss than her own circumstances.

"Everything here is based on real characters and the beauty of their lives," Gardot says. That comes through in the mantra-like "Same to You" and the minatory "Don't Misunderstand." Rather than imagining people's lives or inventing stories about others, Gardot interacted with people who passed by her every day. The new album, she says, is thus "about actually encountering the human being beyond the face." The vitality of children born into the world, even at a precarious time such as this, brings a ray of hope into "Morning Sun [For Ezra Richardson]," a song whose lyrics were written the moment Gardot guitarist Reese Richardson's son was born.

"Preacherman," however, is Currency's powerful blues centerpiece, retelling the story of young Emmett Till - murdered in Mississippi at age 14, after rumors he had flirted with a white woman. It's a song that resonates with the racial tension of the moment. "Many people don't know his story," Gardot says. "It's important to pass it on. Ironically, we have situations happening now 60 years later that are not so far-reaching from the story of Emmett. That, to me, says it's time to evolve."

Tickets go on sale Friday. Information: 215-893-1999, www.kimmelcenter.org.