While he sounds utterly assured on the album, Reed didn’t conceal feeling awed by his rapid rise from unknown to headliner at an age when most people are deep into retirement.
“This whole thing has turned my life around,’’ said Reed during a recent interview with his wife, Diane, at a cafe near their house in the East Bay. “We were sitting there working on charts this afternoon saying we never saw this coming.’’
“I didn’t even know Ed sang until years after we met,’’ Diane said, noting that they started dating at the University of California, Los Angeles in the late 1960s.
Once driven to self-medicate by insecurity and torturous angst, Reed is no longer trying to blend into the background. Since recording his first album at the age of 78, he’s taken his rightful place as one of jazz’s most keenly observant singers, a masterly balladeer with a fine-grained baritone who turns familiar standards into wrenching tales.
“I started teaching singers a few years ago, and I tell them, you’ve got to see what you’re talking about,’’ Reed said. “Who is this person? Who are they talking to? What’s the circumstance and emotional landscape? When you can get yourself into that, that brings the lyrics alive.’’
The jazz scene is no stranger to artists who return to the limelight after long stretches in obscurity, but Reed is that rarest of cases, a musician who has come into his own late in life.
“Some people have compared his sound to Johnny Hartman, but Ed is more a vocalist who interprets lyrics than a crooner,’’ says Tana, who spent two decades as an elite New York drummer after getting his start on the Boston scene in the mid-1970s while studying at New England Conservatory. “He’s like Ruth Brown or Abbey Lincoln or late Billie Holiday, though his voice is in really good shape. He’s really lived those songs.’’
