Bowl Richard Groove Holmes

Dianne Reeves struck the high point of the first day of the 1999 Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, finding a groove and running with it toward a swinging, stomping climax. Naturally then, anticipation ran high about this live recording, made only seven months later in the same city with the same Afro-Latin-accented backup band. What we get, though, is a different and mixed bag, an intimate, more musically varied concert before only 300 or 400 invited listeners in Los Angeles's S.I.R.