“There are different ways of communicating those things in different genres. In a Broadway or cabaret style of singing, the standards that we jazz singers sing take on a different life. And there’s an art to that — to making a song climax exactly in the right place where it’s supposed to climax. But I think the reason that doesn’t work so well in jazz is because it’s not just about the singer’s journey, it’s about everybody who’s on board’s journey, whether it’s just me and Jed or a larger ensemble. And to me that’s what’s interesting to listen to in a jazz singer — how the whole piece takes shape in the moment.” After some thought she adds, “If you think of Billie Holiday singing ‘All of Me,’ she makes us feel a million different things about that lyric. And it comes from pulling from her influences — Louis Armstrong, Mildred Bailey, Bessie Smith. But you also hear what’s in the air at the time — you hear her relationship to the people she’s playing with. And I think that makes for a very different kind of emotional delivery.”

Open was also a chance for her to combine the direct expression and simplicity of the singer-songwriter tradition with the harmonic and structural sophistication of jazz. “I think jazz is very communicative, so it made me sad to feel like that might be lost in some way — in my own language. I mean, whatever jazz is doing out there on its own, it’s doing fine, but in my own language, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t losing people with complexity, but I didn’t want to lose the complexity necessarily either.

“Ct Bridge,” for instance, “is very singer-songwriterly, but it’s much more complicated harmonically, it has an odd form and it has an improvisational section that has a different harmonic structure. A Van Morrison song isn’t going to look like that on paper, but to me it’s very singer-songwriterly in nature.”

Wilson, for his part, had turned more and more to the singer-songwriter tradition by time he graduated from NEC. When I reach him in Portland, Oregon, where he returned after graduating last year, he concurs that he and Eade come to the music from complementary stances. “For her, the jazz side is out front, but then that other stuff is behind, and you can discover it as you go deeper into the songs. And for me it was the opposite; I was more overtly doing the song-oriented thing and the jazz thing was in the background. But that made for an interesting tension.”

At first, Eade resisted the idea that, say, “Go Gently to the Water” — which came to her in a dream — could be a simple three-chord tune in E, but she finally gave in. “I remember waking up and feeling very clear about the music, clear about the lyric, the melody, the harmony. Then I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s so simple!’ And for a moment I thought, ‘Well, it can’t be that simple.’ But then I had to accept that, surrender to that, and say, yes, it actually is that simple.”

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DOMINIQUE EADE + JED WILSON | Regattabar, Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street, Cambridge | November 14 | 617.395.7757