Roberta Gambarini displays her versatility

Who’s the best unsigned singer in jazz? Roberta Gambarini. If the name is unfamiliar -- as it probably is -- it’s because she, like numerous others in a field overflowing with talent, has not yet released a recording.

Gambarini finished third (behind the late Teri Thornton and Jane Monheit) in the prestigious 1998 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition, and musicians from Benny Carter and Hank Jones to Jimmy Woode and Roy Hargrove have praised her abilities.

But unlike Monheit, who was signed by N2K Records immediately after the competition, Gambarini had no offers.

Why not? Her performance at the Vic on Thursday only served to increase the mystery of why this extraordinary, Italian-born artist has been overlooked by American jazz labels.

There was, first of all, her extraordinary versatility. Gambarini sang up-tempo numbers such as “Lover Come Back to Me” with a buoyant, floating sense of swing, agile vocal flexibility and improvisational inventiveness. She sang the blues authentically -- astonishingly so for a performer born in Torino.

In “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” she delivered a vocal version of an all-star instrumental recording, brilliantly spinning through vocalese renderings of solos by Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz. On “Everything Happens to Me,” she capped off her set by exchanging her vocalized trumpet-like scatting with guest artist Hargrove’s flugelhorn lines.

Extraordinary as all this was, her ballads were even better. “I Loves You Porgy,” “Something to Live For” and “Lush Life” were sung with passion and a skill at communication that proved her an intuitive musical storyteller. Amazing stuff, all of it. At the close of Gambarini’s superb program, the essential question, now headlined and highlighted, remained: Why doesn’t this gifted artist have a record contract?