Chicago jazz singer Dee Alexander is internationally recognized as one of the most gifted and versatile vocal stylists alive. Ben Ratliff at the New York Times named her 2013 Newport Jazz Festival performance one of his ten favorite live-music experiences of the year, calling it “both low key and extraordinary, with well-worn standards and risky originals, earthiness and high-flown mysticism.” Her 2009 album Wild Is the Wind (Blujazz) met with nearly universal acclaim, earning a rare five-star review in DownBeat magazine and a place on the cover of a special issue devoted to the best CDs of the new millennium.

Alexander realizes that diminished industry support affects all artists, and she’s not self-pitying or bitter about it. “I don’t get frustrated by that,” she says. “I just feel that when it’s my time, it’ll happen.” In late 2012, when it came time to start recording her new album, Songs My Mother Loves (Blujazz), she took on the expense herself.

“I was able to do this project the way I wanted to do it: live in the studio, have my stellar musicians, bring [alto saxophonist] Oliver Lake in from Jersey, and pay for the mixing,” says Alexander. “So I spoke with [Blujazz owner] Greg Pasenko. I said, ‘Look, I’m working on the CD,’ and he said, ‘OK, let’s do this.’ So we sat down, and we negotiated. It’s being distributed; they’re taking care of all that, and it’s being sent all around the world.”

Her late-70s and early-80s gigs with Baba Eli Hoenai’s Prada Ensemble and “Light” Henry Huff’s group Breath earned her immediate recognition in the small, tight-knit free-jazz community. Huff became one of her most valued friends and mentors. “If it were not for the time and experience that I had with ‘Light’ Henry Huff,” she says, “I don’t think I’d be here doing what I’m doing right now. I learned so much from him, just being with him—his work ethic, the spirituality. He was such a spiritual being, and the conversations that we would have all the time were just—I’ve never had that with anyone. He was my best friend.”

His contributions parallel Alexander’s approach to the project. Though the material is heavy on romance, heartbreak, and nostalgia, she avoids the easy temptations of bathos and sentimentality, instead delivering the songs in the voice of a contemporary woman who’s powerful as well as vulnerable. She underlines the optimistic message of Julian Priester and Tommy Turrentine’s “As Long as You’re Living,” recorded by Abbey Lincoln in 1959—celebrate the moment, live from the heart, nurture the spirit. Lake’s sparse, supple solo reflects that optimism, but it’s toughened by his caustic tone—no flaccid easy answers or new-age wafting for him. And on Lincoln’s “Lonesome Lover,” his angular lines, acidic timbre, and ironically playful runs and skitters redeem the song from self-pity as surely as Alexander’s full-bodied declamation at the end.

It’s a cliche that a musician’s current project is always her best ever (at least if you ask the musician), but Alexander’s enthusiasm about Songs My Mother Loves seems warranted—though a comparison to the more aggressively improvisational Wild Is the Wind is a bit apples-and-oranges, the new album is at least as good. Wilkes, Brown, and the Evolution Arkestra will be on hand for the CD-release party next Friday, August 1, at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, and Alexander is stoked about it—for her mother’s sake as much as for her own. “She’s gonna be the center of attention,” Alexander says. “Songs My Mother Loves—it’s all for her. The most important thing—and I say this all the time—it starts at home. My mom started me off; she was playing this great music at home. Everybody wasn’t blessed to have the mother that I had. Hearing these songs since I was a child, they’ve become a part of me, a part of my life. Even though the songs have been recorded by other artists, they do it their way; I add a little. Reinventions. Just do it the Dee Alexander way.”

Fri 7/25, 7:30 PM, McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Blvd., Glen Ellyn. Free. All ages

Tue 7/29, 5:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, free with museum admission ($12, free on Tuesdays for Illinois residents). All ages

Fri 8/1, 7 and 9 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, $20, $10 for students, $50 for VIP (includes CD of Songs My Mother Loves). All ages