The Motown legend can't forget the Crescent City on Searching, which features jazz and soul songs she recorded with Delfeayo Marsalis in New Orleans

She’s a couple of months shy of turning 85, but Martha Reeves‘ voice still booms with all the excitement of an invitation across the nation when she picks up the phone in her home (which you can’t forget is still the Motor City). “It’s a beautiful day,” she exclaims, her smile coming down the phone line.

Reeves, whose powerful voice fueled “Heat Wave,” “Nowhere to Run,” and, of course, “Dancing in the Street” six decades ago, has reason to celebrate: She will release her first new album in more than two decades, Searching, on Aug. 14. One of the things she sought for the album, whose title “represents hope for the future in all things,” was a change of scenery. So she recorded the album with two co-producers — trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis and her longtime manager, Chris Roe — in New Orleans. Full details of the album’s release, including preorders for autographed special edition vinyl and CDs, will be announced in the coming weeks via Talk Shop Live.

“This is a spark of life,” Reeves tells Rolling Stone. “We’ve done good work.”

The songs Reeves recorded for the album include a rendition of the Syreeta–Stevie Wonder duet “To Know You Is to Love You”; a new version of a song she recorded for Motown in the Sixties that never came out, “I’ve Got It Bad”; Reeves’ own gospel composition, “Thank You, Jesus”; and jazz standards like “Summertime” and “Mood Indigo.” Thanks to Marsalis’ production and the influence of the Crescent City, the music feels both like classic Motown soul and jazz.

The album started coming together in 2023, when Roe got the idea of trying to get Reeves to do a jazz album. He recruited Marsalis at a Dallas film festival, and even though it began as jazz, it evolved as soon as Reeves opened her mouth. “Martha would get into the control booth and just start wailing, and it started to take more of an R&B/blues feel,” Roe says. “And that was OK. There’s no reason to force something.”

Reeves’ Motown past loomed large in other ways on the album, as well. The influence of her onetime labelmate Stevie Wonder reverberates in a couple of different ways since Reeves recorded “To Know You Is to Love You” with two different approaches on the album. The main rendition has a big horn arrangement and a funky beat, while the one included as a bonus track feels more downtempo, allowing Reeves to flex her voice acrobatically. She’s excited for Wonder to hear it. “The last time I saw him was at [Motown founder] Berry Gordy’s birthday party, and it was delightful, but he hadn’t a clue [I recorded it],” Reeves says. “[My manager] Chris and I decided we wouldn’t say anything about it at the party.”

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Regarding the album’s other song with a Motown connection, “I’ve Got It Bad,” Reeves reckons it was one of “over 100, or maybe 1,000 demos” she sang at the request of the label’s A&R department. “I’ve got it bad,” she sings on the song, and backup singers repeat the line, Vandellas style, but this version is undoubtedly funkier than the version of the song that never came out. “I’m hopeful they put out [the archive of songs I recorded] before I leave here,” she says.

Reeves also enjoyed pushing herself out of her own comfort zone on the record, singing Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” which Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone previously recorded. She fell in love with the song when she acted in the musical Ain’t Misbehavin’ and always hoped to record it herself. “That’s got some jazz chords that are not difficult to sing, but they touch a certain place in your heartstrings,” she says. “You know that you’ve been there; you’ve had that mood indigo.”

Even more impressive, at least vocally, is the album’s title track, which she cowrote with Marsalis. Every note Reeves sings feels more remote from the one before it, as she pulls off vocal feats some singers a quarter of her age couldn’t. But she laughs this off, explaining she just wanted to sing like the session musician’s horn.

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“The musicians on Searching are session musicians, but they are musicians who have toured the world with people like Allen Toussaint and B.B. King,” Roe says. “These cats are the best of the best. Delfeayo, who of course is a master on the trombone, is featured on ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘Summertime,’ and he plays brilliantly.”

Aside from jazz songs she’s known most of her life, the album also reflects another side of her youth: “Thank You, Jesus” is a swinging gospel song. “I’m from a family of 12 children, and my grandfather, Elijah Joshua Reeves, had a church in Georgia,” she says. “When we moved to Detroit, we basically sang in our grandfather’s church. Dad played the blues guitar; that’s where I got my blues from.”

The way she sees it, she’s still on the journey she embarked on more than half a century ago. “The word ‘retirement’ doesn’t mean a thing to me,” she says. She plans on continuing live performances, too, where she still sings her Motown hits. “It’s a surprise when you have teens in the front row mouthing the words and enjoying the music as if they were there when we recorded it,” she says. “Motown music is profound. It just makes everybody happy, and I’m so proud to be a part of it.”

And when she turns 85 in July, she’s planning a bigger celebration than usual. “This has got to be a big birthday celebration with the release of a jazz album with the Marsalis family,” she says, again, her voice filling the phone receiver. “I’m just glad to still be here.”

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Searching Track List

1. “Intro”
2. “To Know You Is to Love You”
3. “Searching”
4. “Watch Your Back”
5. “Mood Indigo”
6. “I Got It Bad”
7. “God Bless the Child”
8. “Summertime”
9. “The Golden Hour”
10. “Thank You, Jesus”
11. “To Know You Is to Love You” (Bonus Version)