From the first words out of her mouth, you knew that Melissa Manchester does singing like singing should be done. “I’ll know you by your heart,” she sang, and a man’s old dry heart seemed to jump right up and say yes.

True, there were a couple of numbers – “Bend” was one -- in which the heart said oh, come on, now. But when she got through with a tune like “So’s My Old Man,” with its tale of head-to-head, eye-to-eye romance, you realized you’d been taken right back to the 1960s when the ladies of the land came out from behind the apron and said let’s dance, buddy. Manchester stood on a great big pile of well-played music to get her message across, stacked up by, among others, Peter Hume, who can twang the hollow body guitar in a sort of white-guy, down-home fashion that struck just the right tone. Manchester seemed to specialize in that sort of action. “I Got Eyes” was an even saucier let’s-get-it-on-pal ditty in which swagger was the watchword, bolstered by the work of John Lewis, drums; Cliff Hugo, bass, and Stephan Oberhoff, keyboards. The lyrics were not so salty, of course, in her vintage slow balladry. Here that world-class voice covered up any taint of the cornball or the hammy in the words, burying it in that peaches and cream sound that she produced all night. Every note was made to carry a tasty, well aimed shot of emotion. It was a voice that did everything she asked of it.

A good example was “When Paris Was a Woman,” when the voice took on a stentorian, masculine tone, presumably in tribute to Gertrude Stein’s girlfriend Alice B. Toklas, who narrates the ballad of Picasso, Hemingway and Matisse in the 1920s. Or maybe the idea was “to the barricades,” since Melissa kept balling her little fist concerning the days when Paris loved so well. The Manchester face is a beautiful one, true, but her hands, too, are strikingly delicate and graceful. She made them count in her Barbra Streisand tribute, “The Kind of a Man a Woman Needs,” where she left the mike on its stand and opened her arms at the last line in a memorable gesture of generosity. That really was the underlying theme of this October night at the Cinegrill in Hollywood at the outset of her first personal appearance tour in more than 20 years. Manchester, now 51, put herself across as a lady with a great, generous, open heart --- in a song like “Easy” (“if you want me, you can have me”), or “When I Look Down That Road” (to her hometown where she remembers her mother’s “oatmeal kisses”), or “After All This Time” (“baby, we got this right”) or “Come in From the Rain” (“I want to be the one who keeps you from the rain”).