Texas-born Esther Phillips had a gift for interpreting songs and bestowing upon a lyric the sound and temperament of a wounded heart. She suffered addictions and personal setbacks, which fueled that voice, but record companies had trouble marketing her talents. Performance is her unheralded 1974 funky soul-jazz masterpiece, the fourth of seven albums she did for the Kudu label. Here, Phillips is at once commanding yet fragile, sassy yet vulnerable: On Dr. John’s “Such a Night” and Eugene McDaniels’ ahead-of-its-time “Disposable Society,” she sounds incontestably spirited despite subtexts of sadness, and the results are as breezy as they are beautiful. Allen Toussaint’s foreboding title tune finds the singer gracefully holding back like Billie Holiday—which only makes a line like “As I watch you fall down to your knees/They don’t know that you’re praying to please” all the more poignant. On Chris Smithers’ “I Feel the Same,” with its back-alley guitar and spare urban funk, Phillips sounds almost too comfortable telling us that there’s no easy way to say goodbye.