Jan. 31--This may sound strange, but the most spectacular singing Dianne Reeves offered Friday night in Orchestra Hall occurred when she was introducing the band.
That came toward the end of the show, and Reeves sang, scatted and swung her way through a guided tour of the large ensemble backing her. Inventing melodies, riffing on names, describing her musicians' gifts via vocal lines that danced up and down the scale, Reeves reaffirmed her stature as one of the most creative and technically accomplished female vocalists working today.
Here was the essence of jazz -- the sound of surprise, as critic Whitney Balliett famously put it -- and it proved a striking contrast to much of the rest of the concert.
Not that Reeves was anything less than musically accomplished and sumptuous of voice from the moment she began to perform. But because the vast majority of the repertoire was drawn from her over-produced "Beautiful Life" album, the lion's share of the concert embraced light funk and watered-down R more than anything else.
No doubt Reeves deserves credit for trying to search out new modes of expression after a long career before the public. But the soupy, radio-friendly arrangements often competed with her luxuriant voice instead of supporting it. The carefully scripted instrumentals, meanwhile, hemmed Reeves in rhythmically, even though she sounds best when she's free to soar -- as in her loosely improvised solo introducing the band. So though one could admire the vocal prowess and beauty of tone behind most every note Reeves delivered, the effects of her work unfortunately were diminished by the nature of this repertoire and its far-too-slick instrumentals.
Still, when Reeves was at her best, she showed that she has few vocal rivals on the jazz planet. Consider her startling -- and thankfully uncluttered -- duet with guitarist Romero Lubambo, a longtime Reeves collaborator who always heightens her impact. This time they shared the spotlight in the Gershwins' "Our Love Is Here to Stay," an ancient tune, for sure, and one that does not appear on "Beautiful Life." But the classic song enabled listeners to savor what Reeves can do when unencumbered by trivial accompaniment.
Lubambo opened the piece, his flourishes on acoustic guitar establishing an aura of intimacy that was all too rare in this evening. When Reeves joined in with exquisitely crafted wordless vocals, there was no question that two top-flight improvisers were showing how it's done. Bossa nova rhythms coursed through parts of this performance, but this was Reeves-style bossa, the singer conjuring more heft of sound and fervor of delivery than one typically associates with this Brazilian idiom. The cultural traditions of two continents merged poetically in this moment, and what a pleasure to hear Reeves without sonic distraction.
The best work on the "Beautiful Life" recording, by far, happens to be a Reeves original, "Tango," and it sounded comparably gripping in concert. Reeves' opening solo amounted to a vocal tour de force, her slow tempo enabling her to pack more melodic embellishments into a single phrase than one might have thought possible. Once the band began to play, Reeves rode its rhythms with ease, lingering behind the beat one moment, pushing ahead the next. Notwithstanding the title of the tune, the musical felt as much Cuban as Argentinian, Freddie Hendrix's clarion trumpet solo emphasizing the point.
Reeves did well in another original, "Cold," written with pianist Peter Martin and drummer Terreon Gully, both of whom shared the stage with her. The story-song nature of the piece was tailor-made for Reeves' oft-declamatory vocal style, and her impassioned, woman-power message tamed the band, at least for awhile.
But the tacky instrumentals and droning backbeats of so much of the rest of the music diluted Reeves' appeal as vocalist, no small feat. Regardless of how one feels about Ani DiFranco's "32 Flavors," it surely stifled the jazz impulses at the core of Reeves' art.
Nowhere was the flaw of this entire experiment more apparent than in a reworking of one of the greatest jazz ballads ever penned, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "Stormy Weather." With climaxes flattened and the underlying harmonies reconceived, the piece was drained of most of its surging dramatic power. You could marvel at Reeves' throaty low notes and stratospheric high ones without being very much moved by them.
In all, an interesting gambit, but far from Reeves' best work.
Jazz note: A celebration of Polish violinist Michal Urbaniak will feature a reception at 7 p.m., screening of the biographical film "New Yorker by Choice" at 8 p.m. and musical performance by Urbaniak at 9 p.m. Monday at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St.; $25; 773-278-1500 or chopintheatre.com.
hreich@tribpub.com
Twitter @howardreich
