Listening With Dianne Reeves: Looking Beyond The Phrasing, To The Spirit

DENVER — Its been cold here lately, Dianne Reeves said this month, readying plates of food for a late lunch, so I decided to make some lamb. She laid out the meal on the center island of her kitchen here, including sweet iced tea made from hibiscus leaves brought home from Turkey and cornbread that she has been perfecting, trying to replicate a version she admired at a local restaurant. Explaining how she likes to cook, she said: Its 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 Dianne Reeves this formula sounds excessively humble. Ms. Reeves isnt 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.

Her most recent record, which won her a fourth Grammy Award, was the soundtrack to the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck, in which she climbs into the 1950s without affectation. On it she performs standards with a small backing group, a setup reasonably close to the one she will use tonight and tomorrow at Jazz at Lincoln Centers Allen Room. (Her trio will consist of the pianist Billy Childs, the bassist Reginald Veal and the drummer Gregory Hutchinson.) But she has also become known for her own songs, often concerned with, as she puts it, telling stories; they hit a gently counseling chord, encouraging pride and self-reliance.

She has been a long time forming. The present version of Dianne Reeves comes after 30 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 Ms. Reeves seems firmly of a place and time: the middle of America, and the middle of the 20th 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.

Last fall she turned 50. Since 1991 she has lived on a well-tended stretch of a well-traveled thoroughfare in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver, five minutes from her mother (who still lives in the house where Ms. Reeves grew up) and not too much farther from her sister. She was home recently 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 2, after the death of her father. Her grandmother, Denverada Howard, was born in Denver in 1896 and named after the city, and her grandmothers father was a founding member of the oldest black church here, Shorter Community A.M.E. church in East Denver.

Ms. 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 couldnt do or deal with, because we believed in God and we believed that God would make a way.

A test came during the first school busing experiments in Denver, when Ms. Reeves was sent down the same road she now lives on, 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 schools black, Texan music teacher organized a revue that combined the poetry of Langston Hughes and songs like Blowin in the Wind, He Aint Heavy, Hes 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.

Asked to listen to and comment on some music of her choosing, Ms. Reeves put forward Aretha Franklin first. Amazing Grace, Ms. Franklins live gospel album, released in 1972, was a record that hit Ms. 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, youd learn it, she said. But when this came out, it was, like, ahhh. On the album cover she had her hair all tied up, and she had African attire on, sitting in front of the church.

On Mary Dont You Weep, Ms. Franklin at first sounds serene — Were 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.

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