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Dianne
Reeves - Staying True to Her Artistic Self and Grooving All the While
By Steven Fullwood
Dianne
Reeves is used to breaking the rules. As a preteen, during the Civil
Rights Movement in Denver, the Grammy-award winning artist was active
in protests in high school against segregation. As an artist, she's
just as rebellious and eschews the label "jazz singer" in
favor of being called an artist whose foundations lie in jazz. Hard to
place comfortably in any genre, Reeves' catalog illustrates the
cross-genre path she has forged for over two decades. She points to her
formative years as the basis for her way of seeing and being in the
world of music.
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 Courtesy
Blue Note Records
Dianne Reeves
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"I grew up listening
to a lot of different kinds of music - R&B, soul, gospel,
rock-n-roll - and the music was very conscious music," she
recalls. "And another thing that was happening was that jazz
musicians were reaching out to world musicians and they were coming
together, and I was listening to all of that." Reeves views music
as one thing - an expression of self - the spirit of which has given
birth to thirteen, genre-busting albums. As her latest album reminds
us, The Best of Dianne
Reeves, she's provided the world with a
wide-range of musical experiences - most notably jazz - that has both
expanded the genre and remained very true to its roots. Best known
as a "jazz" singer, she has been criticized as abdicating
the throne as this generation's preeminent jazz artist in the
tradition of Billie
Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald or
Sarah
Vaughan. Reeves
shrugs off the critique and instead hones in on art in general and
artistic integrity in particular.
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"There are so many
critics that say so many things," she laughs, "the way that
I view it is me today or tomorrow it is someone else. Overall, you
have to stay true to yourself and your art and keep on grooving
because they, meaning critics, will call you many things." She
does acknowledge the compliment buried within the critique. "It
does however feel really good, to be mentioned in such company, but at
the same time there are some incredible, young up-and-coming talents
that I've either had the opportunity to work with or talk to and they
all have these unique and different voices, so you know," she
says, smiling. |
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Speaking of that company, Reeves' The
Calling, Celebrating Sarah Vaughan, uses her supple vocals to honor
the jazz legend that she says made a way for singers like herself to
come up and pursue their artistic journeys.
"Sarah viewed her voice as an instrument
first. The album I did celebrates her artistry, not her music
primarily because she sang so much music," she says with
wonderment. "This is a project that I've always wanted to do. So
I got together with my really good friend Billy Childs, and we
discussed it because I wanted to do an orchestra record mainly because
when Sarah decided to do her live Gershwin project (the 1982 album
Gershwin Live!), she basically put that whole project together
herself."
Vaughan won a Grammy for that recording, a fact
that disturbs Reeves greatly.
"Can you imagine someone like her, whose
career had spanned generations, and only won one Grammy? For all of
that work. She wasn't a star; she was a universe. By the time I had
discovered her [it] was the '70's, and she had been singing for over
25 years by then," Reeves points out. "She was not afraid to
try and sing different things."
At best, Reeves' own sojourn mirrors Vaughan's
(just two Grammys, so far). Most people are unaware of her catalog;
that she has dabbled in straight-ahead R&B/soul (1985's Never Too
Far); that she's covered tunes by rock artists such as Peter Gabriel
("In Your Eyes" on 1999's Bridges), or that she was part of
assembling three generations of jazz musicians for the magnificent
1996 album, The Grand Encounter.
Although the journey has yet to end, Reeves says
that 2002 is the year where she is going to take a much-needed rest.
"I have been recording and touring almost
non-stop in the last five years, and right now, I feel I need to live
a little bit," she says while sipping tea. "So now the dream
is being fulfilled because we're doing a lot of orchestra dates and it's exciting, and the music is different,
it's challenging, and by the
same token where I am right now is to stop and really try to smell the
roses. M
June 2002
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