JOAN WASSER has come up with a new marketing idea. For a small fee, the Brooklyn-based musician will overdub the name on Real Life — a song she wrote to convince a certain Jonathan that they should be together — with one of the client’s choice.

The strategy didn’t work for her, as she admits with a humorous shrug. But its heart-on-sleeve sentiment is typical of the material she’s been recording for the past 15 years.

Now gathered together on the compilation album Joanthology, she’s touring it as a solo and intimate experience, an approach marking something of a return to her early days as a torch singer, with most material being performed on the venue’s Steinway piano.

Opening number To Be Lonely is reminiscent of Rufus Wainwright, with whom she previously played violin, and Forever and a Year has echoes of Jeff Buckley.

Yet, while both would have embellished the arrangements, Wasser’s power is simplicity and a voice designed for smoky jazz bars. Wonderful exemplifies this lack of pretension, for despite her being classically trained it has almost as many instrumental pauses as it does piano notes.

Tonal variation is provided during the two-hour set with the occasional use of guitar and vintage drum machine and this works especially well on the serpentine Flash, with its building guitar loops, while her cover of Prince’s Kiss strips back an already minimal track to sultry jazz.

She also takes the opportunity to rework her own material — Human Condition, a soul-influenced track on 2011’s The Deep Field, is here given a cha-cha drum beat.

The perfect opportunity to re-appraise her career as Joan As Police Woman, this reverentially received show also highlights the travesty that she’s never gone from cult artist to mainstream success.