MUSIC REVIEW : Maturity Suits Rickie Lee Jones : Concert: Gone is the disheveled, drunken brat of a decade ago. Despite some persistent histrionics, the singer has found a loose, comfortable fit.

What a difference a decade makes.

The Rickie Lee Jones who performed an 80-minute set at the Spreckels Theatre on Monday night was a very different woman and artist from the disheveled, inebriated brat who exhibited all those too-much-too-soon traits in an early-’80s performance here. Like her recent work, the 37-year-old’s comportment on her latest pass through town indicated that maturity, marriage and motherhood have had a rectifying, not a deadening, influence on her attitude.

Jones has gotten her stage act together as well, even conceptualizing it to suit her ripened perspective. Stage props included Van Gogh-ish vases of sunflowers, a cafe table complete with red and white tablecloth and lit candle, a suspended, asymmetrical window frame that looked like something architect Greg Grondona would design for a Dr. Seuss production, and bordello lamps that cast a soft, musky glow on the instruments.

The ambience was a correlative of Jones’ current album, “Pop Pop,” a collection of standards, connoisseur-rock curios and arcane ditties performed in a smoky, jazz-combo context. Jones’ five-piece touring band boasted two of that album’s players--Michael O’Neill on electro-acoustic guitar and former San Diegan John Leftwich on bass.

However, if domestic responsibilities and approaching middle-age have brought a patina to Jones’ work, it is the end of her marriage that appeared to most affect Monday’s performance. Jones and her husband of six years recently filed for divorce, and the psycho-emotional weight seemed to hang like a heavy coat over her slight frame, dulling her demeanor.

Indeed, several indicators convinced one that she really wasn’t in the mood to perform Monday night. The first was her entrance nearly 30 minutes after the show’s scheduled start. Later, Jones--known for her Beat poet-influenced, between-song monologues--muttered a few inanities before saying, “I don’t feel like talking tonight.” At another point, she stammered before allowing that “this has been a bad month for me.” There would be other, more awkward moments.

Ironically, Jones’ performance benefited from her malaise, which tempered the digit-snappin’, Village-jazz-babe shtick that has always seemed so contrived, and also forced a suitably subdued treatment of new and old material.

Taking the stage in an Annie Hall ensemble of floppy hat, baggy pants and wide necktie, and accompanying herself on guitar, Jones opened her concert with “The Heart of Saturday Night,” dedicating the Tom Waits ode to the audience because Waits wrote it in his scuffling days as a San Diego resident.

Then Jones dipped into the new opus. An abbreviated, hipster version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” gave way to a cool stroll through “Makin’ Whoopee,” which Jones acted out as though it were dialogue from a Noel Coward script. The capacity crowd played along, rewarding the singer’s every inflection and hand gesture with charmed laughter.

Up to this point, everything clicked. But on the Sammy Cahn- Jimmy Van Heusen warhorse, “The Second Time Around,” Jones sabotaged her own poignant reading with the stylistic excesses that have marred her work over the years.

It’s OK for delivery to rule a lyric, but it shouldn’t be an oppressor. Jones got so carried away with her slurred, Billie Holiday-inspired phrasing and her affected, black-jivespeak that imitation quickly turned to parody. At such times, Jones might be the only vocalist you can’t understand even when there’s little or no instrumental accompaniment.

For the most part, though, the venerable music in “Pop Pop” and Jones’ mellowed attack were a loose, comfortable fit, especially on the effervescent Bobby Timmons-Oscar Brown Jr. tune, “Dat Dere” and on Jimi Hendrix’s “Up From the Skies.” On the latter, Jones reached new heights in her own interpretive creativity by slightly softening and stretching the song’s rubbery rhythms, thereby adding dimension to the music without killing its character. The result was spellbinding.

Jones’ rendering of her own material frequently was less than that. An otherwise evocative version of the lovely “The Last Chance Texaco” was unraveled by a bad habit that, unfortunately, long ago became part of Jones’ vocal lexicon. When she forces notes in her upper register, Jones sounds like a car horn. Repeated blasts can wear down one’s resistance, and by the halfway point of “Last Chance,” the song’s subtleties had been hammered flat by such histrionics.

Jones fared better when she remained in her sensual mid- range, or softened her higher notes with falsetto, as on the new album’s “I Won’t Grow Up,” and in the quieter moments of a segment featuring Jones at the grand piano. Of three piano tunes, “Coolsville” was the most provocative. Sympathetic accompaniment by Leftwich and saxophonist Keith Fiddmont contributed to a marriage of dramatic lighting and Jones’ pained vocalizing that gave almost uncomfortable immediacy to the lyric’s tale of emotional woe.

After “Coolsville,” Jones returned to center stage, but suddenly removed her guitar. “I don’t feel like doing this right now--you guys play,” she said to her musicians, and walked off stage. It took the startled band several moments to recover, and they earned a nice ovation for their ad hoc instrumental. Jones came back for a couple of tunes, including an enchanting “The Moon Is Made of Gold.”

Then she made another announcement.

“We have to get something straight right here,” she said, more than half-seriously. “This next song is the encore.”

Any cynics in the audience might have found significance in the final selection of a relatively short concert--1979’s “Easy Money”--but those aware of her current affairs had to applaud her pluck, as well as the maturing artistry that is coalescing the more genuine aspects of Jones’ life and music.