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| Photo courtesy of diannereeves.com. |
The recent death of Abbey Lincoln made it official. The golden age of female jazz singers is over.
But that doesn’t mean the genre is played out — not by a long shot.
Contemporary women are finding a way to sing jazz without slavishly
imitating Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, the three
titans who set the standard over half a century ago. One of the best is
Dianne Reeves, who appears as part of the Wisconsin Union Theater’s
Isthmus Jazz Series on April 8.
Reeves rivals her idol, Vaughan, in virtuosity. She shapes phrases
with exquisite subtlety, making use of a shiver-inducing lower
register. Her ballads have a languorous quality, with dramatic swooping
notes and a delicate vibrato. On up-tempo numbers, the lyrics sometimes
dissolve into scat syllables, Fitzgerald-style, and Reeves melts into
the band as just another instrument. At times like these, she
communicates something ineffable — a sort of bliss that exists beyond
the realm of words.
Familiar melodies don’t sound at all familiar when Reeves gets
through with them. She has a gift for improvising, to the point where
standards like “The Man I Love” and “Love for Sale” become something
else entirely — something she can call her own. This is jazz singing of
the highest order, matched by only a handful of others since Louis
Armstrong invented the art form in the 1920s.
Virtuosity is one thing, but finding a song’s emotional essence is
something else entirely. That’s where Billie Holiday excelled, and
Reeves often seems to feel her material as deeply as Billie did.
Onstage, she’s an actress, allowing her tales of love or loss to
register on her face.
Jazz doesn’t mint many stars these days, but Reeves has made her
mark. She’s won four Grammys, and she appeared as a 1950s jazz singer
(not much of an acting stretch) in George Clooney’s movie Good Night, and Good Luck. It doesn’t hurt that she looks so glamorous on album jackets and magazine covers.
Why did Reeves, 54, gravitate toward jazz when pop or R&B might
have been an easier path to fame and fortune? Chalk it up to the rich
cultural environment of the 1960s, when jazz held out the promise of —
in her words — “music without boundaries.”
Reeves grew up in Denver, in a family of musicians. She
sang around the piano in a casual way, and it wasn’t until she got to
junior high that she realized music was really her thing.
“It was empowering for me,” she says. “So I decided that this is what I want to do.”
At the ripe old age of 12, Reeves started working seriously. She
formed her own band, playing proms and even doing out-of-town gigs. She
looked for opportunities to sing wherever she could find them.
“I used to go hang out,” she says. “The culture of jazz music was
very much alive then. You could go into places and sit in and sing. And
my parents or uncle or sister would escort me.”
Reeves wasn’t just singing jazz back then. She experimented with
the whole range of sounds that came out of the vibrant 1960s culture.
“It was a rich time then,” she says. “A lot of the world was
changing, and at that time people really wrote about that kind of
stuff, from Bob Dylan to Stevie Wonder to Marvin Gaye to Aretha
Franklin. Everybody was talking about the times.”
For Reeves, jazz was an important part of the mix, even though it had declined in popularity post-Beatles.
“A lot of the architects of the music were still alive at that
time, making all kinds of amazing records,” she says. “Miles Davis,
Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Return to Forever — so many amazing
groups. It was music without boundaries.”
Most exciting of all was the musical mixing-and-matching characteristic of the 1960s.
“The thing I loved was that rock, jazz and classical music all
loved being around each other,” Reeves says. “That was before people
started putting them in bins and separating everything. A rock musician
would do a song, and jazz musicians would cover it. Or rock musicians
would do a gig because there’d be amazing jazz musicians there.”
Reeves studied classical voice, sang in the high school jazz band, and tried to find a style of her own.
“I’d come up with my interpretation of a song,” she says. “At that
time it was really important to have your own voice. That’s how the
industry dealt with everybody — you know, your uniqueness. Nobody tried
to sound like anybody else.”
Reeves went to the University of Colorado, then to Los Angeles in
the late 1970s to try to make it in the biz. She did studio work, sang
a variety of styles with other people’s bands (including Sergio Mendes
and Harry Belafonte), and, in 1981, landed her first record contract.
By the mid-’80s, Reeves had arrived. She toured on her own and
started releasing an album every year or two, including the Grammy
winners In the Moment (2001), The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan (2002), A Little Moonlight (2003) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2006).
“When I go back and I think, did I struggle? Yes,” she says. “But it was fun, because everything was about music.”
It’s funny to hear Reeves refer to “struggle,” since she makes having a successful jazz singing career look so easy.
One of the keys to her broad appeal is her ability to tell a story through song.
“I’m looking for who am I in the song, where am I, where does this
take place, who am I talking to?” she says. “I break lyrics down like
that. My favorite thing is to be able to show a picture, sort of like a
short film, when I’m singing. I tend to pick songs, or write songs,
that allow me to do that.”
In other words, songs are more than just melodies to improvise on. To Reeves, the words actually mean something.
“I think words are powerful, especially when you give your
emotional energy to them,” she says. “So I’m very conscious of the
things I sing about — that they mean something to me.”
An essential skill for a jazz singer is the ability to improvise.
Reeves relishes the idea that she and her band never do a song the same
way twice.
“Improvisation is not just singing through changes in a song,” she
says. “It’s like when you know a thing so well that you can change up
at a moment’s notice. You can bend and flow and pick different
directions. It’s like a conversation [within the band]. That’s what I
love about my band — they’re all impeccable musicians. So when I’m on
stage and I might sing something a different way, they’ll go there, and
it always creates something unique.”
Reeves’ band at the Union Theater includes Peter Martin on piano,
Reginald Veal on bass, Romero Lubambo on guitar and Terreon Gully on
drums. They’ll play standards, Reeves’ original tunes and songs by
women composers. But, as befits a master improviser, nothing will be
set in advance.
“We’re constantly changing the show,” Reeves says. “We never have a
set list. I work with my musicians and I feel what the moment says to
do. And those are the songs I call for the night.”
In the early ’90s Reeves moved back to Denver, where her
family still lives. She likes the quality of life there and always
looks forward to going back after her international tours.
“Denver is a big city with a small-town vibe,” she says. “You don’t
spend your life in your car or in traffic. It has these beautiful,
well-manicured parks all over the city, and every day I wake up and see
a panoramic view of the mountains. They’re only a half-hour away, and I
can go up there with friends in any season and ski, snowshoe or hike.”
Reeves also likes to cook, and her Denver friends are the beneficiaries.
“I always have interesting people over,” she says. “I love to
entertain and cook a really great meal, so people can discuss all kinds
of things.”
One of those things, undoubtedly, is the state of jazz. Reeves is
confident of the music’s staying power, pointing to Esperanza
Spalding’s startling win as the Grammys’ Best New Artist this year.
“All over the world there are these [jazz] institutions, schools
and programs, so yeah, the music is still very much alive,” she says.
“As with any kind of music that evolves, I think it’s in transition,
just like the world is now. In 20 years I could probably tell you what
the state of jazz is better, in retrospect.”
