Arts & Lectures
2001-2002 Performing Arts Season News Release
For Immediate Release

January 8, 2002
Contact: Susan Gwynne
(805) 893-2098
e-mail: gwynne-s@sa.ucsb.edu

Grammy Award-winning jazz singer Dianne Reeves celebrates Sarah Vaughan at the Arlington Theatre

Summary Facts:

Jazz singer Dianne Reeves, noted for her strong, agile voice and rhythmic virtuosity, will perform the tribute Celebrating Sarah Vaughan on Friday, February 15 at 8 pm in the Arlington Theatre, 1317 State Street, Santa Barbara. A four-time Grammy Award nominee and winner for best jazz vocalist for In the Moment—Live in Concert, Reeves is one of the best-selling and most highly acclaimed singers to emerge in the 1990s. This concert follows the release of her 11th album, The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan (Blue Note), which honors the artist who inspired Reeves when she first listened to Vaughan’s records while in high school. “More than anything I was struck by her voice—its color, range, the places it went to create feelings,” Reeves says of the experience. “I didn’t know the voice could do all that. She changed my way of listening, and all of a sudden I had a place to reach for in my own singing.”

To capture the experience of The Calling, which features an orchestra along with Reeves quintet, this concert will feature 30 members of the Santa Barbara Symphony, conducted by Gisèle Ben-Dor. The luxurious sound of strings and swing will help Reeves emulate Sarah Vaughan’s style on classics like “Fascinating Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” “Send in the Clowns” and “Lullaby of Birdland.” After a similar concert in the summer of 2001, the Los Angeles Times stated, “To her credit, Reeves maintained a strong sense of personal identity in tunes strongly identified with Vaughan...She once again displayed the virtuosity that places her among the top echelon of performers in her field.”

Reeves is a singer blessed with natural talent: an operatic mezzo-soprano voice with a 2-1/2-octave range, the ability to switch effortlessly from smooth ballads to improvised scat, and a firm command of pitch, phrasing and harmonics. She’s also noted for the range of genres she performs, for although she’s a star of the famed Blue Note jazz label, she’s recorded songs by artists as diverse as Milton Nascimento, Duke Ellington, Peter Gabriel, Rogers and Hart, Joni Mitchell, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Cohen. Reeves also writes some of her own songs, from “I Remember Sarah,” her upbeat blues tribute co-written with longtime collaborator Billy Childs for The Calling to “Better Days,” a gospel-tinged narrative about her youth that she keeps revising and expanding. In fact, the most recently recorded version of the track, “The Best Times (Grandma’s Song),” has been hailed by the Washington Post as “a picture of Black southern life as vivid as any you’d find in a story penned by Maya Angelou or J. California Cooper.”

Reeves was born to a musical family in Detroit in 1956 and raised in Denver. Her father was a singer who died of cancer when she was only two, while her mother played trumpet, her uncle played bass for the Colorado Symphony and her cousin George Duke is a celebrated keyboardist, composer and arranger who has produced many of her records. As a teen bussed into largely hostile white neighbors for school in the volatile late 1960s, music became truly important to her when she organized concerts to show how music crossed racial boundaries. Singing with her high school band at an educator’s conference in Chicago she was heard by famed trumpeter Clark Terry, who became just the first of many jazz greats to sing her praises. While touring with Terry in 1975, Reeves had the opportunity to play on a bill with Sarah Vaughan herself. After Reeves’ rendition of “God Bless the Child,” Vaughan came back stage and told her, “As long as you live, I don’t want you to open for me again.” Reeves recalls the incident, “At that moment I was crushed, because I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t get it, but everybody was laughing, and then I understood...it was a compliment.”

A Pre-Concert Discussion with Dianne Reeves, led by Sylvia Curtis, UCSB Black Studies and Dance Librarian, will be held at 7 pm for ticket holders only.

Dianne Reeves is presented by the Santa Barbara Symphony and UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by Prudential California Realty, Magic KMGQ, KCLU Public Radio and Metropolitan Theaters. This residency is funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment of the Arts, a federal agency. This performance is funded in part by the Santa Barbara Foundation and the Audience Development & Marketing Program, using funds provided by the City of Santa Barbara in partnership with the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission. Tickets are $45 and $35 for the general public and $25, but in limited availability, for UCSB students.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Susan Gwynne at (805) 893-2098.

©2001 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara