In an era awash in twentysomething jazz chanteuses and wannabe hipsters, Ed Reed is an anomaly in more ways than one.

At age 78, Reed finds himself entering the spotlight at the point when most singers are winding down. With his debut album, "Ed Reed Sings Love Stories," receiving nationwide radio attention, Reed is getting gigs at ever-larger venues. But to reach this point, he's had to battle demons from without and within, spending four decades in the thrall of heroin addiction, four terms in California prisons, and a lifetime rising above his own insecurities.

"This was my dream, and now the dream is coming true, but it's all so unfamiliar," says Reed, speaking by telephone from his home shortly before an August 29 CD release party at Yoshi's. "This stuff is coming so fast, I haven't had much time to think about it. I just wanted to make a recording, and all hell broke loose!"

"Ed Reed Sings Love Stories" (released by the singer's own Blue Shorts label) is a remarkable introduction, featuring Reed's open, friendly voice in a relaxed ballad setting. He is framed by a sensitive and agile quartet, including the versatile Peck Allmond on trumpet, tenor sax, flutes and clarinets, Gary Fisher on piano, bassist John Wiitala, and drum master Eddie Marshall. 

Buoyed by the band's easy swing, Reed's performances are warm, soft at the edges and full of character. He keeps things unpredictable, making surprising jumps up and down the register, while imbuing his delivery with an emotional quality that many young singers simply lack the life experience to match.

"When I'm singing, the question for me is: who is this [in the song]? Who would say these things, and why? I really have to know what that lyric is about. What's the point of standing up in front of an audience if you're not saying anything?"

From Cleveland to Los Angeles

Reed's story begins in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was born on February 2, 1929. "My mother was a singer too, and we sang all the time," he says. A domestic by profession, Reed's mother had operatic talent and was once offered an opportunity to study at Milan's Teatra alla Scala, only to be barred by her own mother. Reed's father worked as a chauffeur in Cleveland, and later as a waiter on the Southern Pacific railway.

"I lived on 97th Street in Cleveland," Reed recalls, "and on the corner was a place called the Cedar Gardens, where all the top bands would play. My mother and I used to walk by there all the time, so I'd always hear that music. And up and down the street, there'd always be music coming from the windows: Louis Armstrong, Erskine Hawkins, all those bands."

After moving to Los Angeles in the 1930s, Reed became further immersed in music. By age eleven, he was getting informal lessons from bassist Charles Mingus, whose sister lived across the street. "He used to babysit for her, and the music was always going, him bowing and playing on top of records and stuff. Whenever Charles showed up, I was there. He taught me how to listen to changes, and how to know where I was in a tune."

Reed's favorite musicians in those years were horn players with a sensitive side: "I got into Johnny Hodges, really early," he says. "'Sentimental Lady,' 'Passion Flower'… that stuff was just gorgeous. There was a big Lester Young/Coleman Hawkins battle going in those days; I was on the Lester Young side. He sounded like a singer to me."

Digging the Heyday of L.A.'s Central Avenue

The 1940s saw the heyday of Los Angeles' Central Avenue scene, a rich stew of bebop and r&b that would make stars of some of Reed's classmates and acquaintances, including singer Little Esther Philips and sax blaster Big Jay McNeely. Reed remembers it fondly. "It was like heaven. I thought these people were supremely happy and that they had everything. I just wanted to be a part of that, it was so hip."

Reed sang on the Avenue himself, taking part in amateur nights at the Lincoln Theatre, where musical comedian Pigmeat Markham was the emcee. "He'd come on wearing those long shoes and that clown outfit," recalled Reed. "He was the arbiter, and if the audience didn't like you, he'd run out with this big ol' pistol and shoot you! It was awful, man! But you had to keep coming back, 'cause if you got shot, you'd get razzed for weeks! You had to go back to prove yourself."

At about this same time — the end of the Second World War — Reed started down a path that would derail his life for decades. Dissatisfied with high school, Reed dropped out, left home and enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 17.

Reed was assigned to the Oakland Army Base as a driver. But as ships full of soldiers arrived for unloading after the war, they also unleashed a deluge of drugs and alcohol. "We suddenly found ourselves with access to all this morphine, you know? One day I saw this sergeant shooting up, and he was like, 'come on, youngblood, you can try some of this.' Next thing I know I'm with a bunch of guys on 7th Street going to buy smack." Reed wouldn't be free of addiction for the next forty years.

"You know, I had such a tiny ego, no sense of self," Reed says. "I needed to be with people. I thought [shooting up] was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of, but they said if I didn't do it I couldn't hang with them anymore, so there I was. I just wanted to please people so they'd treat me nice."

Sabotaged by Drugs and a Stint in Prison

After his Army service, Reed spent some time singing with trumpeter Dupree Bolton, but drugs sabotaged the experience. "It always ended up in a hassle. We got stranded, ripped off, just crazy stuff. We didn't know what we were doing. Dupree had been with Jay McShann and Lionel Hampton, but he didn't know nothin', you know? All he knew was how to play, not how to have a meaningful life. It was really sad."

Reed's own life was now spiraling out of control. "We were all trying to be Charlie Parker, but he was so self-destructive," he says. "At one point I was going to commit suicide, but that turned into a circus too. I couldn't even do that right!" In 1951, Reed went to prison on drug charges, the first of four incarcerations in San Quentin and Folsom over the next decade and a half.

But while this could have been the end of the story, Reed found musical inspiration even in this most depressing of circumstances. California prisons in the 1950s and '60s were home to a rotating cast of prominent jazz players: Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper and Frank Morgan were just a few of the musicians Reed met behind bars.

One day in the late 1950s, Reed had an encounter that would change his life, with a guitarist named Ralph Bravo. "He was playing 'Embraceable You,' and I'd never heard anybody play like that. I started humming along; I couldn't help it. He grinned and we just kept going, chorus after chorus, each one different from the others." 

It was Bravo who first convinced Reed that he had real talent as a singer. "I'd always felt like a beggar around musicians," Reed explains. "Nobody had ever really encouraged me to keep singing. They'd say, 'that wasn't bad, man... okay, let's do an instrumental!' But now here this guy was coming around looking for me, wanting to go play some tunes. For the first time I felt like a partner instead of a hanger-on." But Bravo was also a heroin addict, and the drug soon claimed his life.

Life (and Jazz) After San Quentin

After Reed's final release from San Quentin in 1966, music faded into the background as he developed a strong interest in social justice issues, helping to run a day care center for the children of migrant laborers in Sacramento, working for the Catholic Welfare Bureau and getting involved in community development projects in Los Angeles. Ironically, Reed was instrumental in creating one of California's first methadone treatment programs for heroin addicts — only to become a client himself.

It wasn't until 1986 that Reed managed to kick his habit, after 25 unsuccessful attempts. "I finally got that heroin wasn't taking me anyplace and I didn't have to keep doing it," he says. Reed put his experience to use as an educator and program planner for HMOs and other health care organizations, a career he maintains to this day.

Reed began singing again, playing casual blues gigs with guitarist Alex Markels and trying to recapture some of the magic he'd found with Ralph Bravo 30 years earlier. Eventually, Reed landed a weekly gig at Berkeley's Cheese Board Pizza Cooperative, where he has honed his craft every Tuesday evening for the past two years.

At the suggestion of his wife Diane, Reed attended Jazz Camp West in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2005, where he caught the ear of instructor Peck Allmond. "Peck was the one who told me I had to record," Reed says. "He latched onto me and wouldn't let go! He sent me to [producer] Bud Spangler, and those two and my wife stood me up in front of a mic in a studio."

"Ed Reed Sings Love Stories" was recorded in February of 2006, with Reed and Allmond collaborating on material from the Great American Songbook. The album includes several lesser-known standards, such as "If the Moon Turns Green," previously recorded by Billie Holiday and Anita O'Day. Reed was drawn to the tune's nebulous phrasing and dreamlike lyrics. "It's so metaphorical," he says. "'Shadows get up and walk around, clouds fall down from the sky, rivers begin to flow upstream'... I love stuff like that. It's such a fantasy."

Songs That Say Something Lyrically

Reed says he has always preferred songs with depth and substance. "I don't like simple stuff," he declares. "It's gotta have something in it other than mairzy doats and dozy doats. I'm interested in harmonic complexity and lyrical quirkiness. I want a song to say something lyrically."

"That's why I called the album 'Love Stories'," he continues. "These really are love stories, and not just in the simple sense. I love the music, I love the lyrics. Something about the tune has hung me up, harmonically, rhythmically or lyrically. I'm a ballad singer, I'm interested in heartbreak and love songs."

The album has opened doors for Reed, who now has gigs far from the familiar confines of the Cheese Board. In the coming months, Reed will make two appearances in the Monterey area, at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas on September 19 and in a special performance for radio station KRML in Carmel October 13. Then it's off to the East Coast for shows at the JazzImprov Live convention in New York at the end of October and Boston's Emerald Ball on November 3. He'll be back in the Bay Area for a concert at The Jazzschool in Berkeley on November 11.

Reed is itching to record a second album. "If I had the money, I'd go back in the studio right now," he says. "I can't wait. I want to emulate Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass, just me and a great guitar player. That's my dream, to just be able to record, you know, to leave something here."

Looking back, Reed regards his past mistakes as an object lesson for others. "If you're gonna have a life, you have to be the one who decides how that life is gonna be," he declares. "It took me 50 years to figure that out, and that's what I teach folks today: you have to sort out who you are, what your purpose is, what you want and where you're going, what help you need, what kind of people you want in your life. Once you have that sort of clarity, then you can start to be the person you want to be, instead of a victim."

Forrest Dylan Bryant is a jazz journalist and DJ based on the San Francisco Peninsula. He writes frequently for online and print publications and can be heard on Friday mornings as the host of "No Cover, No Minimum" on KZSU, 90.1 FM. You can visit him online at http://www.fojazz.com.