Dianne Reeves, ‘Love is in the Air’
Jazz at Lincoln Center 

She has crossed a thousand bridges, in her search for something real. That’s essentially the opening line of “Bridges,” the English-language title for “Travessia” by Milton Nascimento, in the memorable lyric by Gene Lees. It’s my favorite song by Dianne Reeves, and she made it the musical high point of her annual Valentine’s Day concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The evening found her crossing many bridges. She began and ended with two classic love songs, “What’s New?” and “That’s All,” the first associated with Sinatra, and the other from the Nat King Cole songbook. More importantly, here are two songs with minimalist titles that deliberately convey as little information as possible, and extremely understated texts. 

“What’s New” is essentially just a string of small talk, but provides a strong structural framework for a master storyteller like Ms. Reeves to work it into a complete and overwhelming experience. She thus bookended the night with tales of romance — what the late Abbey Lincoln referred to loosely as “songs about a man and a woman” (a description that might not fly these days). 

Along the way, there were all kinds of other songs, and other kinds of bridges. Songs about family. Songs about the betterment of mankind. Songs about the journeys we take and the bridges we cross in life. Songs about new tomorrows and second chances. Songs about childhood, youth, and innocence. Songs about dancing the samba. 

To say she sang every kind of song there is would not be accurate.  There’s one genre of songs she seems to deliberately avoid: not merely sad songs, but songs about feeling sorry for oneself. That’s something she has in common with the marvelous contemporary blues singer Taj Mahal, who has said that he doesn’t want to sing anything that makes his audience feel guilty.  

Even “Yesterdays,” often sung as a song of regret, is far from remorseful in Ms. Reeves’s interpretation. She included it in her breakthrough album, “Dianne Reeves,” in 1986, bringing “Yesterdays” to the present moment by including a multi-tracked Dianne Reeves choir in the background. During an interview I did with her at that time, she impressed me with her honesty and forthrightness when she confessed that she felt she was too young to fully fathom the full implications of what that Jerome Kern classic actually means, so she tried instead to tap into the deep, 50-plus-year history of the song itself.  

Ten years later, she introduced her current arrangement of “Yesterdays,” in her album “New Morning (Live in Paris),” which is close to the way she performs it today. Although it’s uptempo and swinging, it’s hardly light or frivolous. Likewise, we’ve all heard “Someone to Watch Over Me” sung with a touch of melancholy or bittersweetness. When Reeves sings it, the Gershwin classic becomes securely optimistic, as if she has absolutely no doubt whatsoever that someone is watching over her, even as we speak.  Most of the time, she is as she sings in the classic jazz waltz “I’m All Smiles.”

There were much newer songs, too, like “Peace” by Norah Jones, an illuminating duet with her pianist, Ed Simon, delivered with both the simplicity and the power of a prayer. Her own song, “Grandma,” was warm and loving while avoiding the shallow pleasures of nostalgia. 

Thus there were, as the Lees lyric goes, bridges to tomorrow and bridges to the past. It was another bridge that took her to a series of classic songs from Brazil, starting with Jobim’s “Triste,” which in direct defiance of the words (“Sad is to live in solitude”) she delivered as an upbeat, jubilant duet with her longtime guitarist, the Rio de Janeiro-born Romero Lubambo.

Near the end, she invited the rest of the quartet, including Mr. Simon, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Terreon Gully, back on stage, and then dived into “Nothing Will Be As It Was,” a song that sounds militant in some hands but affirmative in Ms. Reeves’s performance. She slowly kicked off her heels and started singing and dancing a wordless, nameless samba over a yellow carpet apparently placed on stage for that very purpose.

Having brought the sold-out crowd to a peak of excitement, she turned on the romance again with “That’s All” — appropriate for a closer — and then encored with “Grandma.” It was 90 minutes of soul-healing, faith-affirming sounds; to hear Dianne Reeves is to love life.