It’s a happily ever after

When singer Ed Reed left Los Angeles some 40 years ago, his dream of a life in music had curdled into an addiction-fueled nightmare. A member of the heroin-racked bebop generation, he had studied and jammed with jazz legends, but his self-destructive ways sabotaged his musical plans.

Now in the midst of a remarkable late-blooming career, the 80-year-old Reed returns to L.A. for performances at the Crowne Plaza Hotel LAX’s Brasserie Jazz Lounge on Thursday and the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown Hotel on Friday.

“I cannot tell you how wonderful it is, returning to L.A. after leaving in utter disgrace and despair,” said Reed, on a recent sunny afternoon in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, where he performs every Tuesday at the Cheeseboard Pizza Collective. “It’s a homecoming, and I’m coming back rejuvenated, triumphant.”

With his expressive brown eyes and inexplicably unlined face, Reed doesn’t look like a hard-knock survivor of San Quentin and Folsom state prisons (he was busted for narcotics possession and forgery). He can detail his incarcerations with mischievous humor, noting that the best bands he ever played with were behind bars.

By making good use of his time inside, camping out in the prison library and learning songs off the radio, he emerged from his ordeal with his soul and voice intact.

If his story sounds familiar, it’s because many of Reed’s peers walked a similarly sad path. He performed in San Quentin’s famous, talent-laden warden’s band with jazz greats like Art Pepper and Frank Morgan, who both went on to illustrious post-prison careers. But many musical friends died young or in obscurity.

By the time Reed, who was born in Cleveland and raised in a striving, middle-class family in Watts, served his last sentence in the early 1970s, he had long since given up the jazz life.

“I didn’t even think about singing,” Reed said. “Everybody was using drugs, I thought I’ve got to leave music alone because it will kill me. I’ve got a whole graveyard of people in my memory.”

Sober since the mid-1980s, Reed found his calling as a health educator. He started playing little restaurant gigs around the East Bay, never expecting to find an audience. But in the summer of 2005 at JazzCamp West, multi-instrumental faculty member Peck Allmond heard Reed sing a ravishing version of “If the Moon Turns Green” and realized he wasn’t hearing a dilettante.

“I was astounded at the beauty of the tone of his voice, his really subtle sense of time and the freedom with which he sang,” Allmond said.

The Brooklyn-based Allmond made it a personal mission to see that Reed recorded an album. He wrote the arrangements for Reed’s debut collection, “Ed Reed Sings Love Stories,” and his second release, last year’s acclaimed “The Song Is You,” a program of American Songbook gems heavy on Ellington, Arlen, and Rodgers and Hart.

Reed delivers each line at a languorous pace, his idiosyncratic phrasing uncovering unexpected emotional insights in even the most familiar lyric.

“I think my approach to ballads is shaped by my love of Johnny Hodges,” Reed said, referring to the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s lyrical alto saxophonist. “And then I listened closely to Miles Davis too.”

He’s recently begun to gain national attention, playing high-profile East Coast gigs and appearing on Marian McPartland’s popular NPR show “Piano Jazz” last January.

“He’s got the most rich voice, perfectly in tune,” McPartland said. “The idea that a man at his age could start a new career and come into his own with such a strong musical personality is so wonderful.”

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Ed Reed

Where: Brasserie Jazz Lounge, Crowne Plaza Hotel LAX, 5985 W. Century Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 6 to 10 p.m. Thursday

Price: No cover; $15 food and beverage minimum

Contact: (310) 642-7500

ALSO

Where: Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown Hotel, 711 S. Hope St., Los Angeles

When: 6 to 10 p.m. Friday

Price: No cover; $15 food and beverage minimum

Contact: (213) 488-3500