From San Quentin to the spotlight

These days, Ed Reed is singing more than the blues

By Andrew Gilbert, Globe Correspondent  |  July 20, 2008

BERKELEY, Calif. - In the late 1940s and '50s, heroin swept through the modern jazz scene like a merciless plague, striking down dozens of elite musicians in the prime of their careers. Some players, like saxophonist Frank Morgan, trumpeter Red Rodney, and pianist Hampton Hawes, were more fortunate, eventually returning to action with renewed vigor and authority after losing years to scuffling and prison.

Ed Reed, however, might just be sui generis when it comes to jazz survivor tales. Swept up by addiction as a young man when he was an unknown singer with deep self-doubts, he didn't really come into his own until last year with the release of a captivating debut at the age of 78, "Ed Reed Sings Love Stories." The San Francisco Bay Area vocalist makes his Boston debut as a headliner on Thursday at Scullers with the Peck Allmond Quartet, celebrating the release of his second album, "The Song Is You" (Blue Shorts).

The gig is one in a spate of high-profile engagements, including a CD-release party at Manhattan's Jazz Standard and a coveted spot on Marian McPartland's popular NPR show, "Piano Jazz."

"I'm at a stage in life when I'm not expecting a whole lot," Reed says after his weekly gig at the Cheese Board Pizza Collective, a mainstay of Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto district. "I'm mostly about singing the songs, and I can sing them here or there." Reed might be taking his newfound renown in stride, but there's nothing blasé about his music. Sober since the mid-1980s, he still sounds amazed that he lived to uncover the pithy wisdom buried in standards. A master balladeer and a jazz singer in the truest sense, he absorbed the influences of Nat "King" Cole and Bill Henderson while honing an idiosyncratic style with phrasing that flows according to a lyric's emotional contours.

"The songs teach us about life," Reed says. "We've all got grieving to do, and if we pay attention, the music teaches us how to go about it."

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in a striving, middle-class family in Watts when the Los Angeles neighborhood boasted a thriving musical community, Reed learned how to hear chord changes by hanging out with Charles Mingus, who lived across the street from his sister.

Rebelling against his parents' expectations that he pursue a professional degree, Reed ran away from home at 17 to join the military and got hooked on heroin while stationed at the Oakland Army Base. It was the start of a decades-long, self-destructive odyssey that led to four stints in prison, including a stay in San Quentin when he sang with a talent-laden prisoners band featuring legendary altoist Art Pepper. Despite his ordeal, Reed looks far more like a well-tended 65-year-old than an impending octogenarian.

"I took my first drink in 1941 and took my last one in 1986, and in between was hell," Reed says. "But I was kind of like Teflon. I wasn't angry. I didn't blame anyone. I thought there was something wrong with me."

What didn't slide off of him were the hard knocks from his musical peers. He was gifted enough to join stars like Hampton Hawes at jam sessions, but he'd try to calm his nerves by smoking marijuana, which he claims left him tone deaf. And Hawes inevitably threw him off the bandstand. Decades later, when peers like Frank Morgan resurfaced to widespread acclaim as authentic voices from the bebop era, Reed kept to the background.

"I always thought that Frank was a phenomenal player, and I didn't see myself in that class," Reed says. "I was afraid of musicians. I had been humiliated so often by Hampton Hawes. I guess that stayed with me until I got into recovery."

When Reed cleaned up for good he found his calling as a substance-abuse educator. Over the years he performed at little joints around the Bay Area but never put together his own band or sought to build a career.

At the urging of his wife, Diane, Reed attended JazzCamp West in the summer of 2005, and he quickly stood out from the crowd of aspiring musicians. Trumpet and saxophone teacher Peck Allmond was struck by what he heard and became determined to help document Reed's voice. The New York-based multi-instrumentalist wrote the arrangements for Reed's debut album and produced "The Song Is You," contributing incisive solos on several horns.

"I was astounded at the beauty of his voice and his really subtle sense of time," Allmond recalls. "The first thing that he said that really gave me some insight was that he spent a number of years in the penitentiary with Art Pepper, Frank Morgan, and Dexter Gordon, and a little light bulb went off in my head. Oh, he'd been working with great artists, just not in a forum where the rest of us could hear it. Then all of the sudden his voice made sense to me, because before I knew that, it was kind of freakish. How could this guy sound so good and I've never heard of him?"