A harmonious sound

Violinist and composer Jenny Scheinman performs in support of her first vocal album at the Museum of Fine Arts. (Bill brett for the boston globe)

The back porch meets the front parlor when Jenny Scheinman plays music. Her take on folk and bluegrass is uncommonly refined, while jazz turns earthy and plain-spoken in Scheinman's hands. The Brooklyn-based violinist and composer has made a name as both an expansive young bandleader and an in-demand sidewoman backing artists like Bill Frisell, Norah Jones, and Lucinda Williams, but now Scheinman is taking a turn in the spotlight - and at the microphone - touring in support of her first, self-titled vocal album.

Her show at the MFA's Remis Auditorium was an absolute pleasure. She sings like she plays, in declarative phrases, unflashy but rousing, each note chosen for its musical and emotional resonance. (She also dresses like she plays, in a surprisingly harmonious combo of clingy summer dress and scuffed brown oxfords.) Most songs started with Scheinman holding her violin like a guitar, strumming or plucking the humblest plinking sounds imaginable; then the band would ease in, building burnished waltzes and graceful thigh-slappers and gently piercing rock songs on an electric and an acoustic guitar (Adam Levy and Robbie Gjersoe) and upright bass (Todd Sickafoose).

The set list was as subtly eclectic and evocative as the playing: Scheinman's artful, thoughtful originals fit beautifully alongside a tart read of Jelly Roll Morton's "Winin' Boy Blues," Lucinda Williams's tough-as-nails tearjerker "King of Hearts," a swinging take on the romantic Platters's hit "Twilight Time," and traditionals like "I Was Young When I Left Home" and the Mississippi John Hurt obscurity "Miss Collins."

Maybe it's her clear-eyed approach to whatever she's playing that makes Scheinman's genre-blurring repertoire feel so seamless and of a piece. Blood ties are the glue on the new album, where the covers are songs she learned as a girl from her parents and the originals are unflinching family portraits. "Newspaper Angels" is a melancholy sketch of her isolated hometown in Northern California, and "The Green" tells the true and haunted story of her aunt, who disappeared one day without a word. She road-tested several brand new songs at the MFA, as well, one a minimalist rock tune about her judgmental older sister, another a folk song with a fascinating vantage point from which the singer wonders if her lover's affections would be truer if he were her brother.

Even on the evening's most adventurous number, a modern pop meditation by Rebecca Fanya that Scheinman has dubbed "Rebecca's Song," the artist's luminous violin solo - a jigsaw puzzle of long, fat tones and surprising squiggles - was anchored by an extraordinary sense of humanity and humility. If only Tom Waits could have heard her close the show with "Johnsburg, Illinois." It's one of Waits's rare autobiographies, an uncharacteristically sweet love song written in the early '80s about his new wife, and Scheinman brought it plaintively, tenderly to life.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music visit boston.com/ae/music/blog.