At various times, Madeleine Peyroux has been called a pop singer, a blues singer, a folk singer and a jazz singer.

Peyroux, of course, assiduously avoids pigeonholing herself, figuring those sorts of labels have more to do with the person doing the branding than her singing.

Peyroux, however, doesn't object if people want to call her a jazz singer, though she's not entirely comfortable with the designation.

"I would love to say that I'm a jazz artist," Peyroux (pronounced Peru, like the country) said during a telephone interview, "because I do believe in the spirit of jazz, first and foremost. It's what's kept me alive. It's a kind of music that has freedom because it's not a strict type of interpretation. It welcomes every other style of music into the fold.

"Any kind of fusion, jazz is at the root of that because it's just a spirit. In the spirit of jazz, I'm a jazz artist. I'd love to be a jazz artist."

Peyroux, who will perform with her quartet Wednesday night at Harrisburg's Whitaker Center, most closely hewed to what most people consider jazz on her debut album, "Dreamland," released in 1996.

She recruited players like saxophonist James Carter, drummer Leon Parker and pianist Cyrus Chestnut and covered songs by the likes of Billie Holiday (with whom she shares a strong vocal resemblance), Fats Waller and Ella Fitzgerald.

When Peyroux, born in Georgia but raised in Southern California, New York City and Paris, reappeared eight years later with her follow-up, "Careless Love," she covered songs by Bob Dylan, Elliot Smith and Hank Williams.

"Probably the most important aspect of being a singer, being a live performer is choosing your repertoire," Peyroux said. "It has to come from several very different thought-out parts of the psyche to make it work."

When it comes to choosing her repertoire, Peyroux picks from the best, not shying away from tunes inextricably tied to a particular singer or songwriter.

On her newest album, "Careless Love," Peyroux covers "Everybody's Talkin'", a Fred Neil song made famous by Harry Nilsson, "River" by Joni Mitchell, "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" by Tom Waits and Charlie Chaplain's "Smile," memorably recorded by Nat King Cole.

Peyroux, whose style tends toward understatement, finds her own melancholic voice in all four of those songs, managing to reveal something not found in previous versions.

Though it would be a stretch to say she makes them her own, she does make them sound fresh.

"I think the trickiest part of doing a song that's been around for a long time is you don't take for granted what's been done already," she said. "You have to be part of that dialog in order to find your own interpretation of something."

When considering songs to record, Peyroux said she usually looks at the words first and the melody second.

"The lyrics are very important to me," the 34-year-old singer said. "I think that's what keeps me going as a singer right now. I'm not a singer of great technical ability. I never have been and I think at this point in my life — at my age — I'm not going to run around and become an opera singer."

Peyroux augmented her covers of other people's songs with four of her own tunes, all of which she co-wrote with Larry Klein, the producer of "Perfect World." Walter Becker of Steely Dan also has a writing credit on one of the songs.

She said she was intent on including some original material on "Perfect World."

"The question, I think, was whether or not anything would be able to stand up against the other songs on the record because I choose usually the best songwriters that we have and always choose from that repertoire."

She said she won't rule out recording an album of all originals some day, though she needs to learn to work quicker.

"It's taken me years, literally, to finish songs, so now I'm co-writing," she said. "So there."

Madeleine Peyroux, Wed., 7:30 pm, Sunoco Performance Theater, Whitaker Center, 222 Market St., Harrisburg, $42.50 and $38.25, 214-ARTS.

E-mail: jferguson@lnpnews.com