In the early 1960s, the Impulse! label tried to steer its star saxophonist John Coltrane away from increasingly uncompromising and experimental music that it feared might be scaring its customers. Label boss Bob Thiele suggested a more palatable all-ballads album with a little-known African American supper-club singer called Johnny Hartman, whose warm, Bing Crosby-like baritone but bracing absence of schmaltz had already impressed Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Coltrane and Hartman hit it off perfectly, and the 1963 album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, was an unexpected mini masterpiece of restraint, flawless timbral expressiveness, and mutual understanding.
Invited by Blue Note Records in Coltrane’s centenary year to curate his own tribute, post-bop sax luminary Branford Marsalis made that album the template for Dedicated to You – done as contemporary reinventions, not mere cover versions. Marsalis invited Dianne Reeves, a vastly experienced jazz singer with a Sarah Vaughan-like mix of flawless intonation and agile spontaneity, to take the vocal role. “Listening to all the great singers coming up”, Reeves has said, “I learned that they stood in the band, not in front of the band. They saw themselves as co-creators of the sound.”
