Dee Dee Bridgewater:
An Alchemist of Sound
Dee Dee Bridgewater possesses the ability to hollow you out and haunt your insides with an eerily magnetic timbre, the likes of which are not exclusive to her but manifest more often than not in echo chambers, the vaulted ceilings of old sanctuaries, and whispering walls – everywhere else but inside your average person. Her voice, a Pandora’s box of musicality from which Garvey’s ghost escapes whenever she is inclined to cast the wide net of her range, is a living testament to the soul shaking angst riddled wails of mentor, Abbey Lincoln – a lionized jazz vocalist who arguably pioneered a niche for the fringe performer and just happened to be married to Max Roach. A beast of the ethereal, the tonal quality common to much of Dee Dee Bridgewater’s catalog is one that renders the female jazz vocal to a narcotic substance just potent enough that the mind’s eye imagines her breath perennially flecked with the pungent caramel of burnt sugar and the ear would like nothing more than to languish indefinitely within a sustained note.
She sometimes manifests as a seasoned actress who just happens to enjoy singing her lines more than saying them, which lends a lot to her appeal as a live performer who can actually play to an audience as opposed to simply playing for them. Less of an octave addict and more of a transformer, Bridgewater shines in recordings and performances where she melts with or without cause into another person, place, or thing entirely. The lack of predictability with which she delivers is one that has both frustrated and enthused fans and critics, who would much rather swaddle her in academic angst and leave her frozen in time wherever she was when they first fell in love with her. The problem with that is that Dee Dee Bridgewater has never fit inside a box and her catalog does not suggest she is even remotely apologetic about it. Mercurial and chameleonic, she remains fervently rooted on Broadway and in the preservation of jazz, but anyone suspecting she might be disinclined to don another hat has yet to truly listen to her. A thrill-seeking alchemist of sound and song, she can and will do just about anything. With jazz as controversial a label as it has ever been amongst those associated with the genre, Bridgewater has spent her career dancing around the box, performing on top of it, but never quite going inside herself. Earning international acclaim as a performer, she may inadvertently have helped set the standard for rising artists who feel their work is bigger than just one word and the graying nostalgia that comes with it.
Dee Dee Bridgewater was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Flint, Michigan where her father worked as a trumpeter and music instructor. At the age of seven, she announced to her parents that she wanted to be an internationally renowned jazz singer. She sang in clubs around Michigan as a teen, before attending college there and later in Illinois during the late ’60s, where she toured the Soviet Union and met trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, with whom she married and had her first child, Tulani – the eldest of three. Dee Dee Bridgewater’s touring career began in the early ’70s with a move to New York City and a stint in the Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra. By 1975 she had performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival, won a Tony Award for her performance as Glinda The Good Witch on Broadway in The Wiz, and released her first solo album. One year later, she won a Grammy for her performance on Broadway, when The Wiz took home Best Musical Show Album. “Love and Peace…”, a later collaboration with Horace Silver, one of her idols, also earned her a Grammy nomination during the ’80s. Her other theatrical forays include Carmen, Cosmopolitan Greetings, Black Ballad, and Cabaret. After touring France in 1984 with Sophisticated Ladies, Bridgewater decided to put down roots, relocating to Paris by 1986 after becoming disenchanted with the climate for jazz in the states. By the ’90s, Bridgewater had played Billie Holiday in Lady Day, performed at The Montreux Jazz Festival. She later won a Laurence Olivier Award, was inducted into the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie, receiving the Award of Arts and Letters in France, and named and honorary Ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. To date, her solo discography stands around fifteen releases. Her first solo release came in 1975, likely to a decent amount of fanfare, with Afro Blue.
It is interesting to note that just one year later, at the height of the disco craze, Bridgewater countered with an album entitled Lonely Disco Dancer. Likely a byproduct of her time as a teen in pop and rock cover bands, Bridgewater channels Deniece Williams and Brenda Russell in a performance that suggests she could have been as much of a fixture on the r&b and pop radio charts as her vocal peers of that era. Considering the allure that the party era presented, it is interesting that with the very left of center deviation from the dynamic jazz vocal people expected from Bridgewater, she never got caught in an avenue for career success that could have yielded notoriety and wealth much more painlessly than the widely inaccessible hyper-intellectualized art house experience that jazz has often been portrayed to be – much to the chagrin of a less discerning public who in the end usually just want to dance. While Bridgewater’s opinion of that era is not readily available, the album’s title is a bit ironic by itself. While she has managed to carve a permanent place in the pantheon of jazz vocalists, she may never have had the same career longevity, albeit hard fought, that she has had so far afield from the pop charts.
Those albums followed a guest feature on Charles Sullivan’s Genesis, released in 1974 on Strata East, highlighted by her performance of “Now I’ll Sleep”, a suicidal ballad renowned for its ability to cut to the heart of everything that is perfectly imperfect about the human experience with a disturbing finesse. The Down Beat notes preceding the full review of Inner City Records’ 1976 reissue of Charles Sullivan’s Genesis discuss her pathos less and focus more on the method of a very deliberate and painfully evocative performance; “Ms. Bridgewater…reveals in her voice an actress’ intensity as well as purity of tone and flexibility of intonation.” Bridgewater notes “Now I’ll Sleep is the one instance where I would hope that no one would be able to identify with my song, but I know that such is not the case. I believe the song describes itself.” In doing so, the emotion it carries is one so familiar to anyone who has experienced the profundity of pain that it manages to normalize the idea of suicide in a way that suddenly makes the desire to die understandable. About Bridgewater, critic Elliot Meadow writes in the liner notes, “Her performance on the frighteningly poignant Now I’ll Sleep is simply exquisite. She imparts all the deep sorrow the lyric suggests. Indeed, this song should be considered a classic of its kind – rarely has such emotion spiraling out from human despair been better captured.” Her accuracy in putting the performance to bed is due in large part to the joy she infuses into each aching phrase – the same joy that comes by the fistful in her recording of “Little B’s Poem,” as she flits playfully across the register. A very basic respect for the nuance of emotion, ultimately setting her apart from your average singer and definitely giving credence to the idea that disco, while fun, was far too short-lived and myopic for a singer of her caliber.
Exposed to jazz at an early age by virtue of her parentage, her equally strong attraction to the red clay of the American south during her childhood was likely a manifestation of epic memory destined to come full circle with the research, recording, and eventual release of her album Red Earth, some decades later. The album was created in Mali, where Bridgewater was doing musical and personal research into her own African origins. What she came back with was a body of work that gave her the space to drape her voice across continents to serve a communal dish that bridge the gap between the place of her birth and her original place of ancestry in a way that even genetic inquiry may not have been able to satisfy. Her view of the experience focused specifically on how sure she was that she had arrived at her ancestral home; the red earth a comfort in an otherwise strange land. The transfusion of long fermented pain from mother to child at the births of infants produced by the black experience endemic to American soil is exhibited in Red Earth’s interpretation of Nina Simone’s “Four Women” and may have been the catalyst for Bridgewater’s Eleanora Fagan, an effective and equally evocative channeling of Billie Holiday, a woman whose voice drove hurt like a bombastic hoodlum in an expensive car and whose life has inspired Bridgewater’s theatrical work. The complete opposite of a dicta-bird, Bridgewater avoids a caricaturish performance reliant upon mimicry of Holiday’s unmistakable vocal tone, opting instead to affect her attitude and performance style in tandem with her own vocal prowess, most strikingly on two of Holiday’s greatest recordings, “Don’t Explain” and “Strange Fruit”. Dee Dee Bridgewater imbues the disgust of a woman scorned by the sour taste in her mouth, as she sings a séance for Billie Holiday; the unfortunate chanteuse whose life and signature drawl have lent to an impenetrable iconography. Other tributes have included Ella Fitzgerald and mentor, Abbey Lincoln.
While Bridgewater has occasionally faced criticism for the ways in which her music has evolved, particularly as she began to spend more time in the worlds of soul and American standards, the suggestion of mediocrity is generally inadmissible in any conversation of her larger body of work. A proponent of personal evolution, Bridgewater notes to All About Jazz, “I want to move forward – To not go backwards, but progress. Constantly.” If nothing else, that in and of itself is the purpose of jazz, to avoid being one thing in particular at any point, ever. The fluidity of curiosity and exploration lies at the root of a genre, whose acrobatic vocal legacy has been charged to her and a handful of others, with the expectation that they will not only promote, but also protect it. What she protects most is the complexity of emotion and the idea that that concept, amongst few others, is the root of great performance onstage and in the recording studio. A scion for the diversity of experience and sound in avenues of life, Dee Dee Bridgewater produces a performance that forces every breath from her mouth in tribute to her musical forebears and acts as master class to her devoted followers.
Words by Karas Lamb