They Booked Martha Reeves for a Jazz Album and She Sang It Into R&B

Martha Reeves performing at Berns in Stockholm.

The plan was a jazz album. Martha Reeves’ manager had the idea, found a producer for it, and got everybody to New Orleans. Then Reeves started singing and the record became something else.

“Martha would get into the control booth and just start wailing, and it started to take more of an R&B/blues feel,” Chris Roe told Rolling Stone. “And that was OK. There’s no reason to force something.”

A Jazz Record That Would Not Stay Jazz

Searching arrived digitally on 14 August, with purple vinyl and CD following in September. It is her first album in twenty-two years, and she turned eighty-five the month before it came out.

The chain of events that produced it was almost accidental. Roe, her longtime manager, was serving as a juror at a Dallas film festival where a documentary about the pianist Ellis Marsalis was screening. Ellis’s son Delfeayo, a trombonist, was there.

“I don’t think he took me seriously at first,” Roe told The Detroit News, “but I did follow through.” Marsalis came to Detroit to meet Reeves, they played what Roe calls “chemistry performances” in Baltimore, and then they went into the studio.

That is a considerable amount of groundwork for a singer who already has the credits. It also explains why the record does not sound like a booking: the two principals had performed together before anyone rolled tape.

Motown Versus the Big Easy

Reeves is direct about what the record was for. “It was aimed, on purpose, to be Motown vs. the Big Easy,” she said. “It’s all about sound, it’s about jazz, it’s about history. It’s about making beautiful music with instruments and men who have practiced their instruments and became genius in their artistry.”

They recorded at the studio Delfeayo’s father built. Her recommendation of it is unqualified: “Every artist in the world, if they don’t record there, they should just witness it.”

She draws the line between the two cities through the players rather than the styles. “I think the musicianship is the quality of Detroit and the method that Berry Gordy recorded Motown,” she said — which is a working musician’s account of what the Motown sound actually was.

The comparison holds up historically. Motown ran on a house band of jazz-trained players working to a pop brief; New Orleans has spent a century producing exactly that kind of musician. Putting a Motown singer in front of them is less of a crossover than it looks.

Delfeayo Marsalis is a useful producer for that reason specifically. A trombonist from the most documented musical family in the city, he is close enough to the jazz tradition to have proposed the standards in the first place and secure enough in it to abandon the plan when the singer went somewhere else. Roe’s summary — “some of these songs that we fortunately were able to record, it wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have first-class musicians” — is a producer crediting the room rather than the concept.

What She Chose to Sing

The track list runs across everything she has ever done. There is “Mood Indigo” and “Summertime” from the standards repertoire, her own gospel composition “Thank You, Jesus”, and “I’ve Got It Bad” — a song she cut for Motown in the Sixties that was never released.

Her reason for “Mood Indigo” comes from the theatre rather than the record collection. She fell for it while appearing in Ain’t Misbehavin’, and told SoulMusic.com: “That’s got some jazz chords that are not difficult to sing, but they touch a certain place in your heartstrings. You know that you’ve been there (because) you’ve had that mood indigo.”

Reviving a shelved Sixties Motown recording is the sharpest choice on the album. A song that the company decided against releasing sixty years ago, sung by the same voice at eighty-five, is a small correction to a decision nobody else remembers being made.

Reeves has said the album’s title “represents hope for the future in all things”, and SoulMusic.com reads the whole project as a celebration of endurance at a point where most of her contemporaries have stopped.

The Song Stevie Wonder Does Not Know About

The album contains two versions of “To Know You Is to Love You”, the Syreeta and Stevie Wonder song. One carries a large horn arrangement over a funk beat; the bonus version is slower and lets her move around the melody.

She has not told Wonder. “The last time I saw him was at Berry Gordy’s birthday party, and it was delightful, but he hadn’t a clue I recorded it,” she said. “Chris and I decided we wouldn’t say anything about it at the party.”

A third version has done something none of the others were built for. A dance remix by the producer Eric Kupper entered the Billboard dance chart at No. 31 — a chart placing, in 2026, for a singer whose first hits landed in the mid-Sixties.

That is not a novelty result. Dance radio has always been a route by which older soul voices reach rooms that would not otherwise book them, and a remix that charts is a piece of distribution rather than a gimmick.

A Duty, Not an Inspiration

Asked what inspired the album, Reeves rejected the premise. “I’ve been recording all my life. I don’t have to be inspired. It’s a duty of mine. I love recording. I’m always in the studio.”

The gap in her discography, then, is not a gap in her working life. She has been performing throughout; what stopped for twenty-two years was the release of records, which is a different thing and largely somebody else’s decision.

“I have a musical connection with the world and it started in 1962,” she said, “and I have been connected, spiritually with the world.”

The release mechanics say something about why the gap closed now. Rolling Stone reported that the preorders for autographed special-edition vinyl and CDs would be handled through Talk Shop Live, a direct-to-buyer channel rather than a label’s retail campaign. An artist who wants to sell a physical record to the people who already know her no longer needs anyone’s marketing department to agree that the record should exist.

Her voice carried “Heat Wave”, “Nowhere to Run” and “Dancing in the Street”, three of the hardest-driving records Motown ever put out. Those are not delicate performances, and a singer built for them does not automatically become a jazz stylist because a producer books the session that way.

Flowers While She Lives

She spent the week before release at Dearborn Music, signing advance copies for people who came to see her. Her account of her eighty-fifth birthday explains the posture she is taking towards all of it.

“I had said previously to my friends, give me my flowers while I yet live,” she said. “So I got a house full of flowers and I’m loving it.”

Her summary of the record is four words long. “This is a spark of life,” she told Rolling Stone. “We’ve done good work.”

It is the same argument being made across this music by the few who are left to make it — Mavis Staples releasing her fourteenth solo album at eighty-six with a producer from a different genre entirely. Both records were assembled by younger people around a voice that was already there, and in both cases the singer simply did what she has always done and let the arrangement follow.

About The Author

Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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