Julia Haile steps back into the spotlight, starting with a month at Ça Va

Julia Haile, an Old Fashioned in one hand, sits with her back to the wall at a corner table inside the Majestic. With perfect stillness, she watches the jazz trio onstage a few feet away: trumpeter Hermon Mehari, bassist Karl McComas-Reichl, drummer Marty Morrison.

Mehari is a longtime friend, Haile tells me later. The two met at the UMKC Conservatory, eight or so years ago. At the set break, Mehari joins our table, and the two share an easy conversation that pinballs among topics without lingering on any very long. After 15 minutes, Mehari rises to return to his post. He asks Haile if she’d like to join the trio for a song.

“Oh, no, no, I’m OK. I just want to enjoy,” she says, smiling and waving him away.

There was a time when her answer would have been different. Haile was the singer for soul-covers band the Good Foot, one of KC’s most in-demand acts. And by the time the group broke up — in 2012, after four years together — she had become recognizable and sought-after on her own. But Haile retreated not just from the Good Foot but also from the spotlight.

“The Good Foot was going pretty hard for a few years, turning over every Friday and Saturday night, doing three- or four-hour gigs,” she had told me before. “It was fun, and I had a lot of fun doing it, but I just needed a break. I wanted to step back and focus on different things, just because change is healthy.”

Her desire for relative musical leisure is apparently ongoing. As Mehari returns to the Majestic’s stage, she turns to me and says, “I never get to just enjoy.”

Over the past three years, Haile has agreed to a few guest spots here and there, and has spent some nights singing jazz standards at Anton’s Taproom. In 2013, she helped found the Buhs, a local supergroup that includes Mehari and rapper Reach. But that ensemble, she says, has played so infrequently since its inception that she doesn’t really count it as a creative outlet, let alone an interruption in her plan to keep a low profile.

Now, though, there’s a fresh breach in that plan. Haile is taking over Thursday nights at Ça Va in July.

“I was really intimidated at first,” Haile says of the residency, which kicks off July 2. “It’s five dates, a two-hour set, which can be pretty daunting. But I think it’ll be fun to do some really unexpected, funkier rock-and-roll stuff and do it stripped down. I love that place, so it’s just kind of an excuse to be somewhere I like and pull musicians that I wanted together and play some cool stuff.”

Tina Turner covers and classic jazz songs are on Haile’s mind, but she’s also planning to debut a handful of brand-new songs. Over the past year, she tells me, she has slowly built a catalog of original material with a new band — guitarist Tim Braun, trumpeter Nick Howell and drummer Kian Byrne — with songs she describes as funk- and reggae-inspired.

These players, as well as several others, figure into Haile’s Ça Va residency, though she has conceived her core sets for shifting duos and trios. It’s a trial run for Haile, ahead of her still-nameless band’s August premiere.

“It’s the first big project that I’ve done since the Good Foot, and it’s a huge step,” Haile says of the new ensemble. “It’s all going to be original music. It was different with the Good Foot because it was other people’s ideas and other people’s songs, and it was different to play those characters for those songs. Now, since I have to come up with something from start to finish and develop ideas, I need to put myself into these songs.

“It’s a collective effort,” Haile adds. “We work together. We come together trading ideas, which is great because then the pressure isn’t on me, and I don’t feel like I’m baring my soul. And I can’t think of everything on my own, anyway. It’s a little push-and-pull, and sometimes I’m not great about changes. But that’s the work.”

It helps that both Braun and Howell played in the Good Foot with Haile, and Byrne, who is also in the Elders, is not a stranger to his new bandmates. Their comfort together has allowed them to refine their music — which she says is big-hearted, ambitious and loud — instead of figuring out one another.

“We all feel so strongly about how it should be presented, and that first show, we really want to blow people away,” Haile says. “We’ve put the hard work in for so long, and to come up with something that’s thoughtful and fun and really gets people energized is difficult.”

Difficult, yes, but Haile has an advantage over most singers. Her voice is a honeyed, supple instrument that works across multiple genres and lends meaning to virtually any lyric. Even as Haile sits in the corner at the Majestic, smiling her private smile, she is unmistakably a frontwoman.

“I’m looking forward to getting back to music and making this venture my own,” she tells me. “Before, I was working on other people’s songs and getting up and playing the part. I needed a break from that, and it’s kind of made me hungry again. I’m grateful to have had the time. Now it’s time to get back to work.”