Variety the Spice of Reeves’ Musical Life : Pop music: The singer, appearing Friday at the Henry Fonda Theatre, has a smorgasbord of styles.

Singer Dianne Reeves is unabashedly, unashamedly diverse. A typical performance by the singer will stretch from down-home jazz to snappy funk, from Brazilian-tinged tunes to African chants.

Suggest to Reeves that this smorgasbord of styles makes her a pop singer one tune, a jazz songstress the next, and then a world music chanteuse on still the next, and she begs to differ: “I call myself a singer,” she says simply. “My roots are in jazz but that has allowed me to incorporate other styles and genres and to experiment.”

This manifold approach has been Reeves’ bent for about as long as she can remember. “I have always been drawn to a variety of musics,” says the vocalist who appears Friday at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood.

“When I was growing up in Denver, I’d listen to singers like Flora Purim with Return to Forever or Dee Dee Bridgewater with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, who were doing all kinds of different stuff and I thought, ‘That’s the kind of music I want to perform.’ ”

She couldn’t find what she wanted in Denver, so she came to Los Angeles, which she’s called home since 1979. “I didn’t know how to get to the music I was attracted to in Denver, but I knew a lot of the people were in L.A., so this was where I wanted to be,” says the singer, 33, who’s concluding a monthlong U.S. tour in support of her new album, “Never Too Far” (EMI), which follows 1987’s “Dianne Reeves” (Blue Note) and two efforts on Palo Alto Jazz.

“Never Too Far”--a collection of, you got it, jazz, pop and world music-influenced selections--has been doing well on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz charts, and is beginning to see a little action on Urban Contemporary charts. Reeves has no qualms about crossing over, nor of being tossed, categorically speaking, into the pop music arena.

“I have waited a long time for these doors (to a broader audience) to open,” she says. “I want to have a following, I’ve always wanted one. If your music becomes popular, becomes pop music, it’s because people like it. In my case, I hope this popularity is based on who I am musically.”

Though for the past couple of years, the Detroit-born, Denver-raised Reeves has worked fairly large venues, such as Carnegie Hall in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, she’s lately gone for smaller theaters, like the Henry Fonda. The 700-1,200 seat houses offer her an opportunity to reach her audience more intimately, and vice versa.

“I think I’d always like to play theaters where I can be in touch with the people,” she says. “I need that kind of comfort, of rapport with the audience. If (the venue) gets too huge, you don’t get to know the people. One thing I learned from working small clubs (earlier on in my career) was that the interaction was important to my show.”

One small club that sticks out in Reeves’ mind is the now-closed Comeback Inn in Venice, where the singer worked regularly between 1979-81, after she arrived here from Colorado in 1977, with a band called Night Flight, featuring pianist Billy Childs.

“That was where I really got started,” she says. “We’d work weekends and get paid by passing the hat. The club seated no more than 100, and for a while, maybe 10 to 15 people would be there. But after a year, the room was packed. It was a place where there no boundaries musically, we just did what we felt. It was very spontaneous and it was there that I started to come into my own, to have some concept of what I wanted to do.”

In 1986, after 18 months with Sergio Mendes and three years as a spotlighted singer with Harry Belafonte, during which time she lived in New York City, Reeves returned to Los Angeles and began her solo in earnest.

“I felt it was time to go on and finish what I set out to do,” she says. “I kept wondering who I was as a singer, where was I going, so I decided to go to back to L.A., it was home by then. When I got here, everything started to happen.”

As far as she’s concerned, Reeves’ life is right on track. “I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do, which is to support myself singing and performing music based on my life experience.”