“It’s been cold here lately,” Dianne Reeves said, readying plates of food for a late lunch at her house, “so I decided to make some lamb.”
She laid out the meal on the center island of her kitchen, including sweet iced tea made from hibiscus leaves brought home from Turkey and cornbread that she had been perfecting, trying to replicate a version she admired at a local restaurant in Denver. Explaining how she likes to cook, she said: “It’s the same thing with how I sing. I work with my ear and try to make it feel right, or I just keep changing it until I like the way it tastes.”
So does every musician. But from Reeves this formula sounds excessively humble. She isn’t stumbling around in the dark; she has the training, the tools, the instrument. Hers is a big and forthright voice, one that sounds as if it might have been trained over the blare of a touring big band, except that such a model hardly exists anymore.
She is a jazz singer who has absorbed some of the loftiest and most difficult models: Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Shirley Horn. She treats standards with skyscraper authority, drawing a circle of repertory wide enough to include material from her favorite singer-songwriters; she has her own vocal and performance devices, subdividing vowels into a dozen notes, pouring forth welcomes and singsong advice to her audience.
In 2005, she recorded songs for the soundtrack of the film Good Night, and Good Luck, and climbed into the sound-world of the 1950s without contrivances; she won her fourth Grammy for it. In the film she played the role of a nameless singer performing in a warren of broadcast studios down the hall from Edward R. Murrow; she sang the standards with a small backing group, a setup reasonably close to the trio she has used since 2003.
There exists a set of listeners who would hear Reeves rather than any other jazz singer alive sing a standard like “Embraceable You,” because she can do so much to it, so imperiously, without soaking it in affectation and becoming ingratiating. Singing other people’s songs, Reeves delivers a mixture of might and reserve.
On the other hand, she is better known for her own songs, which reflect more of her own character and opinion, and are often concerned with, as she puts it, “telling stories”; they are miniature studies about hope and memory and keeping despair at bay. They hit a lightly counseling, Essence magazine chord, encouraging pride and self-reliance.
She has been a long time forming. The present version of Dianne Reeves comes after thirty years of wending among swing-based jazz, West Coast pop-jazz of the 1980s, and versions of black-diaspora songs and bossa nova from jobs with Harry Belafonte and Sergio Mendes. And before that, a lot of church singing.
Yet Reeves seems firmly of a place and time: the middle of America and the middle of the twentieth century. This comes out in her manners but also in her preoccupation with spirituality, and with a protective psychology that can accommodate frailty and self-doubt.
As we talked about music and performance, she mentioned several times—to my surprise—the fear and intimidation she feels on stage. I sensed that we were on the verge of a larger conversation, but it was not forthcoming. Later I recognized that same revealing-and-obscuring in one of her more popular songs, “The First Five Chapters.” It is a talked-sung narrative about overcoming (a very Dianne Reeves word) a life’s pattern of falling into holes, but never specifies what, exactly, the holes are. Finally, it becomes a grid of questions for the audience to apply to itself.
In the fall of 2006, Reeves turned fifty. Since 1991, she has lived on a well-tended stretch of an arterial parkway in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver, five minutes from her mother—who lives in the house Reeves grew up in—and not too much farther from her sister. When I visited her, in early 2007, she was home only for a brief stop between tours, but as friends and relatives came in and out of the kitchen through the afternoon, she seemed rooted.
Born in Detroit, she moved to Denver with her mother and her sister at the age of two, after the death of her father. Her grandmother Denverada Howard was born in Denver in 1896. (She was named after the city.) Her grandmother’s father was a founding member of Denver’s oldest black church, Shorter Community A.M.E. church in East Denver. Reeves belonged to that church but also went to Roman Catholic school with daily mass and attended a Baptist church on Sunday. “For us as kids,” she said, “we had the feeling that there was nothing we couldn’t do or deal with, because we believed in God and we believed that God would make a way.
“In a lot of ways,” she elaborated, “music really saved my life. It really helped me to focus. The stage became a very sacred place, because that was where I had this amazing connection with something higher than myself, where I could create and be out on the edge and be totally comfortable with that edge, creating and feeling and hearing and not thinking, not being inhibited or intimidated.”
A test of her belief came during the first school busing experiments in Denver, when Reeves was sent far into South Denver to a white junior high school. It was a tense period; parents of the white children wanted the black children out, and there were racist editorials in the local paper. In retaliation the school’s black, Texan music teacher organized a revue that combined the poetry of Langston Hughes and songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” and “Joy, Joy” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers.
“It was a powerful thing, and it served to bring people together,” she said. “It really changed my life. I really understood that I wanted to sing songs that meant something to me.”
Reeves cleared away the lunch plates and brought two iPods with their speaker-dock to the kitchen table. She had put together a list of music that surprised me on two counts: it didn’t include Sarah Vaughan, and it was at least as much about written words as it was about vocal performance.
She decided first to listen to Aretha Franklin. Amazing Grace, Franklin’s live gospel album, released in 1972, was a record that hit Reeves hard in high school; at the time she was singing Franklin hits with a group of friends who called themselves the Mellow Moods. “Every time one of her new songs came out, you’d learn it,” she said. “But when this came out, it was, like, ahhh. By that time, James Brown was talking about ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ and on the album cover, she had her hair all tied up, and she had African attire on, sitting in front of the church. It was just powerful.”
On “Mary Don’t You Weep,” Franklin at first sounds serene—“We’re going to review the story of the two sisters, Mary and Martha,” she begins—and then the choir starts applying pressure over a slow tempo, making its refrain eerily quiet, occasionally bursting out to high volume.
“Listen to the backgrounds,” Reeves said, and she started banging her hand on the table to the one-two-three of the chorus’s clapping. Franklin enters into a complex series of actions with the band and the choir, half rehearsed, half spontaneous. She invokes Lazarus three times; the third time she hollers, and the choir goes off like a siren. “Woo!” Reeves answered it.
“It’s the spirit,” she decided. “It’s what she knew about, what she learned growing up as a child in her father’s church. For the people in the congregation it’s a statement of faith and belief. But it’s also that whole thing of ‘Let’s gather around, and I’m going to tell you this amazing story.’ I grew up with people telling stories like that, especially after big dinners. It would start here”—Reeves put both hands together down on the table—“and as they go on and go on, and as you become part of the story, it became bigger and bigger.” She spread her arms apart.
“A lot of times, there’s certain things she says—like, when she talks about Lazarus, when she says his name—I don’t think that was ever rehearsed, that part,” she said. “It’s just call and response, because at that point, everybody is connected, everybody’s involved. They know the Good News of the story; they want to celebrate this story; this is why they’re here. And then she has this amazing ability, with her voice, to bring the story that everybody’s heard many, many times, and do it in a way that just wears people out. It’s like a frenzy. I’m sure that after that, they had to get everybody back to normal and cool. I’m sure they had to edit out all of those things. When I listen to it now, it still gets to me. I can’t imagine what it was like to actually be there.”
When she heard this, I asked, did she want to be this kind of a singer? “Not that kind of a singer; I wanted to have that kind of spirit,” she corrected. “You know, people always talk about ‘what is jazz,’ and it’s really hard to describe. But one thing I do know is that it’s a very intimate exchange between everyone on stage, giving inspiration and ideas to each other; and the other part that’s magical for me is when the audience is in on it.
“When they come in and really get it—when they’re an active, listening audience—it’s like, note one, they have it, they’re on board,” Reeves continued. “And any subtle thing you do, they’ll get it. Aretha says the word Lazarus three times, and the third time she waits a little, and then she lets out with ‘Laz . . .’ and people just go crazy. I’ve seen a lot of artists do this. One person who always moves me is Ahmad Jamal, because he has this ability to bring you to a place and then explode. All of the ones we’ll hear today have that special thing: tell that story through words and music, and through silence and waiting and timing.”
This is gospel music straight up and down. But, I ask, does listening to Aretha Franklin’s phrasing and pacing give her lessons that she applies to, say, “How High the Moon”?
“Oh, absolutely,” she said. “It’s timing. It’s that thing that just makes your spirit rise—that ability to really savor words and savor a story.”
Reeves likes talking about music that isn’t specific to one generation. “The majority of the stuff I listened to, my parents listened to—until I started listening to Parliament-Funkadelic,” she said.
She next chose a track from the 1964 recording Sam Cooke at the Copa, another taste she shared with her mother and stepfather. It was the medley of “Try a Little Tenderness,” “(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons,” and “You Send Me,” and it contains as much vamping as song playing. As with the Aretha Franklin record, Cooke talk-sings his audience through transitions. This was a trick Reeves learned early on, as a performer in high school, especially with her uncle, a bassist with the Denver Symphony who played jazz at his Unitarian church, and in club dates with the pianist Gene Harris, who moved to Denver when she was a high school junior. She hated the spaces between songs, and she needed to figure out what to do about them.
At first Cooke sounds as if he’s stalling: “Oh I never, never/I never, never, never, never, never treat you wrong darling,” he sings, adding on a wordless falsetto figure that Ronald Isley would later borrow and turn into his own trademark.
Cooke framed these vamps as metasongs. He’s singing to the men in the audience, he declares, because men “have a tendency to neglect the ladies.” And as he sings he puts the lyrics in quotation marks, recasting them as mollifying speeches men can deliver to their women. He improvises through the vamping, and he cues the band when he’s ready to enter the song. “And also, you have to tell her, ‘Darling, you send me,’ ” he sings, conversationally. “ ‘I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t mean it’—that works,” he jokes. “ ‘You thrill me, honest you do.’ ”
Why is that performance such an ideal for her? This record isn’t the connoisseur’s Sam Cooke, like Live at the Harlem Square Club or Night Beat. It could be considered Cooke just doing hardsell business, running through teasers of hits on the way to a surer set-piece. “Because he’s standing right on the edge,” she answered. “He’s thinking; he’s forming the words in his mouth. I can tell, because I’ve been there.”
There were other reasons too. “He’s so classy. Yeah, that whole idea was you go out onstage and you entertain. You don’t bring that other craziness. You bring your joy, and you tell them stories.
“And he’s communicating to the band vocally when to start each song,” she added. We went back to a few moments just before the band begins “Try a Little Tenderness.” “He just cued them,” she said, then pointed out another critical moment, just before “You Send Me,” where some flutes create a kind of path to the song’s entry.
How do we know that in some cases the band isn’t cueing him? “Well, in that last case—maybe, I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to see it. But that’s all part of gospel singing, cueing. And I really think he was in control.”
We listened to a song that had nothing to do with jazz or the gospel tradition, “Closer and Closer Apart,” by the pop-folk singer Mary Chapin Carpenter. It is a ballad of middle-aged wisdom, about negotiating loss and moral gray areas, about learning to live in a relationship knowing that some of its problems are unsolvable—Keats’s ideal of “negative capability” in a love song. Carpenter sings: “[And now] all the king’s horses and all the king’s men/Wait for their clarion call/Pride hears its voices and fear wins again/And there’s nothing to break our fall.” (“Mmm,” said Reeves, after that line.) “All I can do, is turn now to you/Holding my hand to my heart/All that I know is I’m watching us grow/Closer and closer apart.”
“I really understand that song,” Reeves said. “All she’s doing is expressing a realization of something, but when she says the words, it’s like ‘Wow, whoa, yes: I know exactly what you’re saying. I felt it, but I’d never been able to exactly articulate it.’ The thing about what we always fall back into is our fear? That’s so real.”
Did she mean that the song helped her recognize her own patterns in herself? “Yeah,” she said. “Beautifully. It also shows you how fragile you are. And also, being able to say, ‘I keep going back to you, and I know it’s ending, and all I can do is just hold my heart, because I don’t want it to end.’ So, you can say, ‘I want this to end,’ but who articulates it like that?” She pointed to the iPod. “So, I love her lyrics. If you sing words like that, that’s all that’s necessary. Where other singers show you what they mean in spaces and silences and colors of notes, she says it in the lyric.”
I asked Reeves if she thought women singer-songwriters had a particular aptitude for that kind of writing. “Oh, yeah,” she said quickly. “There was a Joan Armatrading song called ‘If Women Ruled the World’: “No more wars/no more hate/women can fight but talking’s great/behind your back or to your face/they’d rather talk than murder.’ ” She paused. “I always think about that lyric. I might talk about you and call you everything but a child of God, but I don’t want you to die. We have this ability to be in touch with certain kinds of feelings, and a lot of these things come from our nurturing spirit. That’s what I hear in this music—our spirit that wants to put everything on the table and say, ‘If we can find a solution, or if we can’t, may God continue to bless you.’ ”
We continued in this fragile, melancholic direction. Reeves had been eager to talk about a solo-piano piece by Brad Mehldau that she loved called “Memory’s Tricks,” from the album Elegiac Cycle. It’s a little more than nine minutes long and goes through several stages. It rapidly runs past its sorrowful introduction, warming into a fast, wakeful rhythm, building contrapuntal waves out of baroque staccato phrases, with tumbling, stormy improvisations. Then it ends in a completely different place, more minimal and pecking. It’s classical music, basically, but a kind that could perhaps be invented only by a jazz musician.
“It starts out real distorted, but trying to be beautiful,” Reeves explained. “I listened to this and thought, ‘Gosh, I have had weeks and days with a feeling exactly like this music sounds’—as you’re changing from season to season in your life, as you continuously try to make sense of a lot of things. I’m always trying to look at myself and say, ‘Did I do something to cause this situation? Did I benefit from this situation?’ But at the end of the day, I did the best with what I had to work with at the time, and here I am, right now.”
“Elegiac—I guess that’s like ‘death,’ ” she continued. “I feel there are many deaths we experience in our lives, or even in a week. This is a record of new beginnings, more than something sad and mournful.”
As she talked about this idea of changes in the course of life, of parts of you that close down and parts that start anew, she seemed to be considering both her personal and her musical choices. “I’m fifty now, and through these last ten years I found that a lot of the things I thought I believed in, when I came to a certain consciousness about them, I realized: this isn’t working for me. Going through life, trying to make yourself a better person, listening more clearly, being more conscious, you find certain things falling away because you know better. That’s what a lot of this record sounds like to me.
“It’s not a record that I put on and sit in the kitchen and cook to,” she said. “When we have very rainy days I like to listen to strange things, but they make me feel good. It’s almost like, tomorrow, the sun’s going to shine. When I listen to this, it doesn’t make me feel sad; it just makes me aware.”
What else have you listened to on rainy days? I asked.
“There’s this album that came out long ago by Nana Vasconcelos called Storytelling. I used to listen to it while walking through airports. You have the feeling of being a stranger; it’s the sounds of the Amazon, and he’s creating it with his voices and sounds and textures and all that. I listen to it for sound. One of the things I know about me as a singer is that I really, really respond to sound, and it could just be someone’s harmonic vocabulary; I could sit down and sing with just about anybody.”
On the outside, Reeves would seem to have little in common with Shirley Horn, who loved slow tempos and nearly whispered her songs. She chose to listen to “Here’s to Life,” from Horn’s 1992 record of the same name. Horn was a passionate singer, but tough and concise, with a kind of Bogart sibilance. She played piano as well, using those harmonies as an extension of her voice. It is Horn’s grip on every fraction of a phrase, and the shadings of emotion she put on the words, that Reeves is drawn to.
She came to Horn’s music late and never got to know Horn herself. But by the 1990s, she would see her perform at every possible opportunity. “Growing up, I had this really broad range,” she said. I could do this”—she sings the word in a very high pitch—“and I could do that”—several octaves lower. “When I first started working with Harry Belafonte, we were doing traditional songs from different countries—world music—and I was, like they say, ‘smellin’ myself.’ I thought I had been to the mountaintop and heard everything, and the more complex it was, the more I wanted to sing it. So here was this music and it was very simple, not that many chord changes, but the rhythms would be very complex. As we rehearsed them, I started to understand what the words were about: the song of the Zambezi River and all these things. And when I was able to see them, I wanted people to see them like I saw them. That was when words really started to be something to me. I wanted to create stories and show their power.”
As we listened, Reeves copied the tiniest details of Horn’s vocal performance: the little “mm” added to the end of the line “so give it all you got” in the first verse; the tiny, sharp intake of breath after the line “and all that’s good get better,” toward the end.
“If you broke it down, you could say it was her phrasing,” Reeves said. “But it’s beyond phrasing; it’s breathing life into an inanimate object. The first time she says, ‘Here’s to love,’ she pulls back. She makes it very tender and simple. The second time she says, ‘Here’s to love,’ the ‘love’ is bigger. She has this picture into something. Shirley does that. Nina Simone does that. Carmen McRae does that. If they say love in a certain way, they can mean it sarcastically, or like they’re passionately in love with you, and you’ll understand it.
“On ‘Wild Is the Wind,’ she says things like, ‘Oh my darling, cling to me.’ It just wears me out. I will play it over and over, and hear the passion. That’s in every song she does, whether it’s uptempo or slow. She makes the story feel like something you’ve experienced, like you’re a Peeping Tom.
“When you listen to her, you start to understand what the voice is,” she continued. “When I’m working with students, I ask them: putting ‘great voice’ at the bottom of the list, what do you think makes a great singer? It’s obvious with her, and with Aretha, that it’s your spirit.”
Set List
Aretha Franklin, “Mary Don’t You Weep,” from Amazing Grace (Columbia), recorded 1972.
Sam Cooke, “Try a Little Tenderness”/“(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons”/“You Send Me,” from Sam Cooke at the Copa (ABCKO), recorded 1964.
Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Closer and Closer Apart,” from The Calling (Zoe), recorded 2006.
Brad Mehldau, “Memory’s Tricks,” from Elegiac Cycle (Warner Brothers), recorded 1999.
Shirley Horn, “Here’s to Life,” from Here’s to Life (Verve), recorded 1992.