Star on the Rise Again for ‘a Singer Digressive’ : Pop music: Baby Jane Dexter’s first album came out earlier this year, capping a comeback in a career that began 20 years ago. She opens at the Cinegrill Tuesday.

“A Singer Digressive” is what Baby Jane Dexter likes to call herself. And, if the label doesn’t exactly describe her performances, it perfectly nails her conversational style. This is a lady who has mastered the art of random access--big time.

A recent phone exchange with Dexter from her New York apartment was laced with long, circuitous monologues recurrently interrupted with “I know I’m jumping around like a crazy person” or “Wait, wait, I’m digressing.”

Dexter opens a weeklong run at the Cinegrill on Tuesday. Her first album, “I Got Thunder,” was released earlier this year, capping an acclaimed comeback in a career that began 20 years ago, but got sidetracked by personal problems.

Alternately ebullient and sensual, boisterous and tender, Dexter engulfs her songs ranging from Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” to the standard “You Don’t Know What Love Is” with the rapture of a first love. She is, said Billboard, “a perfect example of raw talent on the verge of becoming a star.”

“What I’m about is not a particular category,” Dexter said. “To me, the music is what comes first. I don’t look for any particular kinds of tunes, I look for songs that say something to me, and then I try to find the way that I can do them--musically and lyrically.”

Dexter was born in Garden City, N.Y. Of her age, she will only reply that she is “timeless.” Dexter says, without the slightest touch of whimsy, that she decided to become a singer after seeing the film “The Al Jolson Story.” After some fleeting contact with community college and local theater groups, she headed to Manhattan and the then-burgeoning cabaret scene.

A large woman who does not hesitate to use her girth as the subject of bawdy asides, Dexter obtained her initial bookings in 1973, very quickly rising to headliner status at such Manhattan venues as Reno Sweeney, the Ballroom and the Grand Finale.

“I started with that I’m-going-to-set-the-world-on-fire, let-me-sing-a-lot-of-loud-songs attitude,” she said. “And everybody was really so excited by this big voice, this big everything. I mean, I was not your average-looking person. I was just a little bit bigger. So it was hard for people to figure out how to market me or what to do with me.”

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The issue became moot when she, for reasons she still has trouble explaining, withdrew from performing. In the years out of the public eye, she appeared frequently on NBC’s “Bloopers and Practical Jokes” and counseled troubled youth.

“I met a guy, I fell in love and suddenly eight years were gone,” she said. “The first year was great, and the next seven stunk. But I couldn’t leave. I got lost. I got derailed, depressed. I had that thing where you lie there and you know that all you have to do is stand up and put one foot in front of the other to get moving again. But I couldn’t stop staring at the ceiling long enough to stand up.”

Dexter finally stopped staring two years ago and hit the comeback trail with sold-out programs at Greenwich Village’s Eighty Eight’s.

“It wasn’t until I had to claw my way back to performing that I really understood that singing was something that I couldn’t not do,” she said. “I didn’t get married and have a kid, I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that. But the music--the singing--is my child, this is my life experience, this is what I am.”