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It’ll be a precedent-setting performance. It’ll be the first time ever for the Safaricom International Jazz Festival to feature a vocalist as the main performer.
This month’s Jazz Lounge edition, to be hosted at the Uhuru Gardens, Nairobi, will feature the acclaimed American vocalist, Dianne Reeves.
This will be the first performance in Kenya for Reeves, who is one of the world’s most prominent jazz vocalists.
I remember watching her perform at the 2009 Cape Town International Jazz Festival in South Africa; it was a delightful performance.
And being just one among many who’re happily under her spell whenever she’s singing, I still vividly recall her fascinatingly note-perfect singing style.
During that concert, her vocals were enhanced by her tightly-knit ensemble featuring, among others, the Brazilian acoustic guitar maestro Romero Lubambo.
Dianne, a vocalist endowed with a broad range of singing styles, has several albums under her name. In her recordings, she’s been backed by some of the finest in the jazz genre, who include her cousin, the late pianist-composer-arranger George Duke.
He was featured on Dianne’s Beautiful Life album, released in February 2014 – four months after his death in October 2013.
Duke’s sound features on numerous impressive jazz, rhythm-and-blues, pop, and rock recordings he performed as a leader or as a session musician.
According to the organizers, arrangements have been made for an additional show, Jazz in the Park, to be held at the Enashipai Resort, situated at the Hell’s Gate National Park, Naivasha, on Mashujaa Day, October 20.
The singer will be backed by an Italian band, Double Cut (a new group to me), and a Kenyan guitarist, Kato Change.
I believe these musicians will give her an accompaniment commensurate to her stature, given the fact that she’s a leading jazz exponent.
Undeniably, therefore, I shall be more than curious to see how the Italian musicians are going to perform, given the fact the singer has consistently featured renowned jazz musicians for her recordings and live performances.
Considered by most jazz fans and critics alike as a disciple of and the ultimate successor to the jazz-vocal icon Sarah Vaughan, Dianne Reeves, in the Beautiful Life album, pays tribute also to some non-jazz singers: soul and R-and-B crooner Marvin Gaye, whose song, I Want You, she re-arranged into a jazz ballad; reggae icon Bob Marley’s Waiting In Vain, which she gallantly tackles; and the famous pop-rock band Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams.
In this CD, in addition to her cousin, she’s also featured younger, up-and-coming instrumentalists such as trumpeter Sean Jones, bassist Esperanza Spalding, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, keyboardist Robert Glasper, and trumpeter Sean Jones.
As testament to her outstanding achievements, Dianne Reeves has won several awards.
In April this year, she received the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Masters award, United States’ highest honour for a jazz artist. Some years back - between 2001 and 2006 – she won four Grammy awards for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.
Her first Grammy was for the album In The Moment - Live In Concert; in 2002 it was for The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan; in 2004 for A Little Moonlight; and Good Night and Good Luck, in 2006.
In 2017, Dianne appeared as a guest singer on trumpeter Nicholas Payton’s heartfelt tribute album to the jazz innovator Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong entitled Dear Louis. She was featured on Blues in the Night, and Sunny Side of the Street.
The vocalist’s inspirations and influences are derived from jazz divas, those who came before her, the ones she’d been checking out when she was starting out, the likes of Dinah Washington and Carmen McRae.
These elements came out vividly in her self-titled debut album Dianne Reeves, released in 1987.
In her own intimate style, Reeves swings through originals, Sky Islands, and Better Days, and standards, I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good, a composition by Duke Ellington and Paul Webster; Yesterdays (Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach); and That’s All (Ellen Brandt and Bob Haymes), and a number of covers, including gems by pianist Herbie Hancock and composer-vocalist Stevie Wonder.
Musicians who accompanied her in this project included Hancock and Duke, Brazilian percussionist Paulinho da Costa; drummers Tony Williams, Leon “Ndugu” Chancler and Ricky Lawson; bassists Stanley Clarke and Freddie Washington; saxophonist Justo Almario; and guitarist Paul Jackson, Jr.
A native of Detroit, State of Michigan, Dianne Reeves is a graduate of the University of Colorado. She was brought up in a very musical family.
Her late father was a singer; her mother played trumpet; her uncle was a bass player; and, of course, cousin Duke. So, with an impressive musical grounding such as this, performing music is very much a natural thing for her.
Reeves has the skills and talents which she exquisitely uses to make her voice come out as a lead instrument, not to mention her soulfully comforting voice.
I believe Dianne Reeves’ performances will be the stuff that most jazz fans in Nairobi will cherish for a long time to come.
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