SETTING NEW STANDARDS
Dianne Reeves defies musical genres
It takes a special singer to find the common ground between Ani DiFranco’s 32 Flavors and the 1933 American Songbook classic Stormy Weather.
But that was among the impressive feats jazz singer Dianne Reeves achieved with Beautiful Life, her 2014 studio album that also found her covering Fleetwood Mac (Dreams), Bob Marley (Waiting in Vain) and Esperanza Spalding (Wild Rose).
The fact Reeves, whose vocal agility has earned comparisons to Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald, would take on numbers from the American Songbook is hardly surprising. But she has also showcased a musically adventurous spirit, blurring lines between pop, jazz and R&B over a 35-year recording career and winning five Grammy Awards along the way. DiFranco, Marley, Stevie Nicks — their work all benefits from Reeves’ rich and expressive voice.
“A lot of the songs are songs that younger artists were referencing,” says the singer, on the phone from a tour stop in Davis, Calif. “I thought, ‘Wow, this would be a good place to come together’ because this is the music I grew up with.”
The album, which also includes originals and a sultry version of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 Disco-lite hit I Want You, is Reeves’ most recent and will no doubt get play in Thursday’s Calgary show at the Jack Singer Concert Hall.
Then again, Reeves’ live shows tend to reflect that aforementioned adventurous spirit and are rarely predictable. With a formidable canon of songs built up over her career, the Detroit native likes to keep her nimble backup band on their toes from night to night.
“My band knows my repertoire so a lot of times I do not have a selected set list,” she says. “I usually call tunes from the stage. That’s the thing that I love. It allows for the music and the experience to be really alive.”
Reeves says the Calgary show will feature new material the band has prepared for an upcoming live album and says she will be paying tribute to Fitzgerald, in what would have been her 100th year.
Fitzgerald is an influence on Reeves, of course. As she rightly points out, it would be difficult to find a jazz singer who hasn’t been influenced by the iconic singer. George Clooney enlisted Reeves to record the soundtrack for, and appear in, his 2005 historical drama Good Night, and Good Luck, which found the singer applying her voice and sensibilities to standards such as I’ve Got My Eyes on You and One For My Baby.
But Reeves’ influences have always gone beyond straight jazz and standards. Before her solo career, she toured with Harry Belafonte. She has collaborated with everyone from Lou Rawls to Stanley Turrentine, Billy Childs, Wayne Shorter and Solomon Burke. She also worked on a tribute to her cousin George Duke, a renowned keyboard player and producer, with Al Jarreau.
Jarreau died Feb. 12. Reeves last worked with him in August, when the two appeared at the Jazz Day All-Star Global Concert held at the White House.
“He was authentic, there was nobody like him,” Reeves says. “He came with an original voice and sound and approach. I think that original sound and approach also was without genre, was without fences, without boundaries. It was something that definitely influenced me as a young person coming up.
“Now I see that, while there is the American Songbook, there are other standards that you can sing and the standards you sing are the ones you grow up with. You can give different things a jazz sensibility. His voice was broad and broad-reaching. For me, he opened up a lot of singers to be able to sing in a different kind of way.”
Born in Detroit and raised in Denver, Reeves grew up in a musical family. Alongside her cousin George Duke, both of her parents and her uncle were musicians. She was barely out of high school when she began singing in jazz trumpeter Clark Terry’s bands.
“The greatest impact on me wasn’t a specific artist but the times I grew up in,” she says. “I grew up in a household that had lots of musicians, but if they weren’t musicians they played fantastic music.
“There were generations of music in my household. You would listen to the music of Motown or jazz artists, someone like Ella Fitzgerald was referencing the music you were listening to. At the same time, there was a lot of transition going on in the United States socially and politically. There was the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and you had all these great artists coming out and singing about these things and developing new forms of writing songs. It was just a real open time.”
Dianne Reeves plays the Jack Singer Concert Hall tonight.