Reeves, Dianne

DIANNE REEVES

Born: Detroit, Michigan, 23 October 1956

Genre: Jazz

Best-selling album since 1990: The Grand Encounter (1996)

Dianne Reeves is an accomplished vocalist with a rich and agile voice that she brings to mainstream and smooth jazz, pop-soul, Brazilian repertoire, and African rhythms, straddling genres rather than integrating them into a single coherent identity. Self-described as a "jazz artist who explores other kinds of music," she pays homage to the late jazz singers Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter, claims the veteran trumpeter Clark Terry as her mentor, and has been produced by her cousin, the jazz keyboardist George Duke. She has also toured with the Brazilian pianist and pop composer Sergio Mendes, the singer Harry Bela-fonte and as a member of fusion bands (Caldera, Night Wings) that realized onstage the heavily crafted studio productions of instrumental jazz that gets commercial radio airplay.

Reeves's family is musical: her father was a singer and her mother a trumpet player. During the years she was growing up in Denver, her uncle, a classical bassist, influenced her musical interests. She began singing and playing piano in her mid-teens and was noticed by Clark Terry during a performance by her high school band at the National Association of Jazz Educators Convention in Chicago in 1973. Terry invited her to perform at the Colorado Jazz Party in 1973 and the Wichita Jazz Festival in 1979, and he appears as a guest soloist on the most traditionally jazz oriented of her recordings, The Grand Encounter (1996).

Reeves moved to Los Angeles after one year at the University of Denver, and freelanced as a studio session singer. In 1980 she co-founded Night Flight with the pianist Billy Childs, who has remained her frequent producer and/or musical director.

Reeves worked her way through the troupes of Sergio Mendes (1981–1983) and then Harry Belafonte (1983–1986). After a brief residence in New York, she returned to Los Angeles, where she resumed activities with session players of West Coast commercial and pop music. The Palo Alto Sessions, 1981–1985 (reissued in 1996) demonstrates her wide vocal range, clear articulation, mastery of phrasing, and interpretive breadth. She sings the standard "My Funny Valentine" with a diva's self-composed drama and treats "Be My Husband" as an African-American chant, bare of artifice. She often employs effusive melisma and relies more often on layers of percolating grooves than on a driving rhythm section.

In the late 1980s Reeves performed at a memorial concert honoring Duke Ellington and performed at the Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival in Japan with the big band of the drummer Art Blakey. These occasions launched her into the international jazz festival circuit, where she has appeared with the Philip Morris Superband under the direction of the bluesy pianist Gene Harris and with Quincy Jones at the Montreux International Jazz Festival from 1980 until 1995.

Reeves was named Creative Chair for Jazz by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association in 2002; she is responsible for creating jazz programs at the Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall. She is the first woman among a handful of jazz leaders to have become the artistic director of a major jazz institution, joining such illustrious company as Joshua Redman at SFJazz, Terence Blanchard at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at the University of Southern California, and Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center in New York.

Reeves's status as a concert, club, and festival attraction in the United States and abroad is dependent on not only her vocal delivery but her choice of material that will be acceptable to a large, general audience. She has expanded on her personal esthetic and core listenership by embracing songs written and/or made famous by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Milton Nascimento, Cole Porter, Mongo Santamaria, and George Gershwin, among others.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Never Too Far (EMI, 1991); I Remember (Blue Note, 1993); Art & Survival (EMI America, 1993); Quiet after the Storm (Blue Note, 1994); The Grand Encounter (Blue Note, 1996); That Day . . . (Blue Note, 1998); Bridges (Blue Note, 1999); In the Moment: Live In Concert (Blue Note, 2000); The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughn (Blue Note, 2001); The Best of Dianne Reeves (Blue Note, 2002).

WEBSITE:

www.diannereeves.com.

howard mandel