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When Dianne Reeves appears at Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday, July 17, it will be on the heels of her European tour. Last stop: Riga, Latvia. This schedule is not unusual for the jazz singer who typically tours for six to seven months each year. Speaking from her home in Denver, Ms. Reeves said during a phone interview that living there gives her life balance. She loves the Rocky Mountain high and all the things that she grew up with there—lots of family, a porch to sit and relax on, and the chance to just be herself. It’s this sense of life that is reflected in her music. “That feeling of hope,” she mused. “I always want to feel that we can move forward and make changes. I always want to feel that I can do that.”
About her upcoming concert—her first time back in Westhampton Beach in four years—she said the material will be similar to what she performed on her European tour, “but done in a totally different way.” In Europe, “I’m doing some orchestral things,” she said.
Precisely what songs she’ll perform must remain a surprise. “Because I never work with a set list,” Ms. Reeves said warmly and very openly. “Everything will be called from the stage.” Indeed, the magnificence of her voice is revealed in those improvisational moments when she’s on stage, where she is free of inhibitions. “It’s straight from heart to sound, being a co-creator with my band. We really create things as we go and I love that.”
What stands out quintessentially about Ms. Reeves’s musicality is the positive spirit and spirituality that it conveys. Even in songs that address the deepest sense of loss such as “Long Road Ahead”—the closing song on her recent album “Beautiful Life”—the focus is on hope and the fulfillment of dreams. And while the ballad is about the loss of her mother, which causes the singer to reflect on regret, the feeling she communicates is powerful and uplifting: “When I see you, I see light, and the hope of more to come. I wish you grace, strength, joy and blessedness as you walk the long road.”
That longing and sadness sustain an intangible presence in her music, having lost her father at the age of 2. Missing him deeply throughout her life, the singer opines that it was that event that “made my music emotional, made it have a spiritual context.”
On the other hand, Ms. Reeves, a lyricist and a wonderful storyteller, often writes about the strong women in her life. Through them she learned about storytelling as a way of keeping memories alive. “They made things happen. Before the phrase ‘It takes a village,’ it was a village,” she said, referring to the sense of community that her mother and the many other women in her family created around them.
Since a young age, music sparked Ms. Reeves’s imagination. “One of the things that I loved … was the sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet without vibrato, and how it made me feel,” she said. “It made me feel something inside like a kind of innocence and vulnerability. I liked the timbre and the tone.” So she learned to paint with a broad voice.
For the four-time Grammy Award-winning vocalist, music was clearly the fabric of life. In addition to her father, who was a singer, and her uncle Charles Burrell, a bass player with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, her early musical influences included jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, whose records were played often in Ms. Reeves’s childhood home. Later, Betty Carter, the first performer Ms. Reeves saw stand in the band, showed her how a vocalist becomes a co-creator with her instrumentalists. “I remember going to hear her perform the same songs from night to night. But they didn’t sound the same because she felt about them in a different way. And they had a new life. And the new life had to do with what happened that day.”
Igniting her sense of musicality with personal experiences is a reflection of that improvisational style. Among jazz musicians, it’s a technique known as scatting. But Ms. Reeves takes this a step further. As New York Times music critic Stephen Holden describes it, she is a master of “wordless, improvised exercises in tonal coloration.” Such is the case with her composition “Tango,” a passionate celebration of song, in a language entirely its own, that is intoxicating, while defying literal interpretation.
As a performer, Ms. Reeves never exaggerates her gestures. Grandiosity isn’t her thing. She simply tells her feelings, as if the song were an internal monologue, albeit told by one who has an enormously rich voice and a bountiful instrument. Beyond all, her distinction is her range. While generous and colorful in her renditions of classics by Sondheim and the Gershwins, she is equally as soulful and agile in her makeover of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You.”
In concert, she is a chameleon, moving from earnest self-reflective songs such as her original composition “Endangered Species,” in which she loudly declares, “I am a gift to the world,” to the cabaret standard “Stormy Weather,” a dramatic declaration of love lost, which she intones in a quiet, smoldering way.
Turning gloom into happiness, darkness to light, and despair into confidence is at the heart of Ms. Reeves’s virtuosity. That her songs feel like they linger, overflowing into infinity, is the gift she brings.
Dianne Reeves performs Sunday, July 17, at 8 p.m. at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, 76 Main Street, Westhampton Beach. Tickets are $70, $80 and $100. Visit whbpac.org or call 631-288-1500.
on Jul 11, 2016