jazz singer
Personal Information
Born Denise Garrett on May 27, 1950, in Memphis, TN; nicknamed Dee Dee from an early age; father a teacher and jazz trumpeter; married Cecil Bridgewater, a musician, 1969 or 1970 (divorced); married Gilbert Moses, a theatrical director (divorced); married Jean-Marie Durand, a bartender; children: Tulani Bridgewater, China Moses, Gabriel Durand.
Education: Attended Michigan State University and the University of Illinois.
Career
Jazz vocalist. Performed at Village Vanguard with Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, early 1970s; performed in Broadway musical The Wiz, early 1970s; worked toward pop career, late 1970s; toured with international company of jazz musical Sophisticated Ladies; moved to Paris, France, 1986; released debut solo album, Live in Paris, 1987; signed to Verve label, 1990; moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, 2000.
Life's Work
One of the many serious American jazz musicians who have found an environment hospitable for their talents in Europe, Dee Dee Bridgewater's vocals, steeped in the traditions of jazz, have extended those traditions to form her own personal style. Bridgewater has sung jazz, performed on Broadway, and made forays into the pop world. During a 15-year stint in Paris, she combined all the elements of her long musical education into a new level of jazz mastery and gained wide recognition for the first time.
Bridgewater was born Denise Garrett on May 27, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee; Dee Dee was her nickname from an early age. Her father was known as a jazz trumpeter around Memphis, but when Dee Dee was three the family moved to Flint, Michigan, so that her father could take a teaching job there. As a teenager in Michigan in the early 1960s Bridgewater's peer group was interested in the growing Motown sound, and she formed a vocal trio, the Iridescents, in hopes of getting a recording contract.
Idolized Nancy Wilson
But her two companions "became more interested in boys," Bridgewater recalled for the New York Times, and left to her own devices she turned to jazz. "Nancy Wilson was my first big idol," she told the Seattle Times. "I loved her stage performance, so classy. My walls in my room were covered with articles about Nancy Wilson." While still in high school she performed with instrumental trios her father put together; underage, she had to sit in the kitchen between sets.
She attended Michigan State University briefly, but switched to the University of Illinois after meeting the director of the school's jazz band in 1969 and finding herself interested in a trumpeter in the university's jazz program, Cecil Bridgewater. Married within six months of meeting, the two toured the Soviet Union with the school's jazz band. But they soon landed gigs off campus and resolved to move to New York to try their luck in the nation's jazz center. Later divorced from Cecil Bridgewater (with whom she remained on good terms and in close musical cooperation) and married twice more, Dee Dee Bridgewater has performed under that name since the days of their marriage.
Bridgewater made a splash quickly in New York, performing at the famed Village Vanguard club with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra. "Everything I know about music today, I learned in that band," she told the New York Times. Performing as far afield as the Soviet Union (for a second time) and Tokyo, she was named Best New Vocalist in Down Beat magazine's annual poll. With her marriage breaking up, however, Bridgewater turned to more lucrative work--with Thad Jones, performing at one of the nation's leading jazz venues, she was earning only $25 a night. In 1974 Bridgewater auditioned for The Wiz, the all-black version of The Wizard of Oz that captivated Broadway audiences in the 1970s. Playing the part of Glinda the Good Witch, she won a Tony award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical.
Frustrating Pop Career
Romantically involved with Wiz director Gilbert Moses, whom she later married, Bridgewater moved to Los Angeles in 1976 and tried to make a new career in pop music. Though she found moderate success with a few recordings that had jazz fusion elements, Bridgewater never warmed to much of the material she encountered. After nine long years, Bridgewater threw in the towel temporarily on her musical career, moving back to Flint to care for her ailing mother. At the same time, her second marriage went sour. "I needed an ocean between my second husband and me," Bridgewater told the London Daily Telegraph. And she put one in place by joining the international touring company of the swing musical Sophisticated Ladies.
What drew her back to her musical roots was a backstage conversation with jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald, whom Bridgewater met in Tokyo as the Sophisticated Ladies company traveled to Japan. "I am a jazz singer, that's in my blood...," Bridgewater told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "I thought an art form was dying and chose to dedicate myself to it..." As the Sophisticated Ladies company moved on to France, Bridgewater was pleased to find that she was already well known among jazz lovers there, always closely attuned to high-quality American jazz. Bridgewater moved to Paris in 1986 and relaunched her jazz career.
Personally and professionally, the decision was the right one for the artist. "My daughters fell in love with the place," she told the Seattle Times. "Three girls running around the place? Are you kidding?" Bridgewater met her third husband, Jean-Marie Durand, a French jazz club bartender, during the first year she was living in the city. And work began to come. Bridgewater starred in the one-woman musical Lady Day, a biographical stage rendering of the life of tragic jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday, and she was the first black performer to play the starring role of Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret, set in Germany during the rise of Nazism. Bridgewater toured Europe and Asia, and was signed to a contract with the Verve label in 1990.
Returned to Jazz
With full creative and financial control over her career, Bridgewater returned to the straight-ahead jazz she had performed as a young woman. After her first Verve album, In Montreux, Bridgewater served notice of her creative philosophy with the title of her next release, 1992's Keeping Tradition. That album, featuring vocal standards, brought Bridgewater a Grammy nomination in 1993, and she followed it up with two tribute albums to jazz artists who had inspired her. The 1995 release Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver, landed on European bestseller charts not only for jazz but for pop as well.
Bridgewater returned triumphantly to the stage of New York's Village Vanguard in 1996, and the following year released the second of her two tribute albums, Dear Ella. Winning positive reviews from jazz journals such as Down Beat, which praised the CD as "exquisite and exuberant," Dear Ella also served to introduce younger U.S. listeners to the music of Ella Fitzgerald, regarded by many as the greatest pure vocalist in jazz history. The album included three arrangements by Cecil Bridgewater, one of them of the signature Fitzgerald number "How High the Moon."
In 2000 Bridgewater returned with Live at Yoshi's, an album recorded at a jazz club in Oakland, California. The album, wrote the Seattle Times, "showcases all her strengths--the thrust of soul music, the chops of swashbuckling jazz improvisation and the inviting personality of an actress." Live at Yoshi's displayed Bridgewater's virtuoso talent for "scat" singing--making instrumental sounds with the voice--more effectively than did her studio albums generally. That year Bridgewater moved back to the United States to be closer to her aging parents, bringing her French husband with her and settling in suburban Las Vegas, Nevada. She seemed to have brought together the many strands of her musical life and hit the peak of her career. Future projects under consideration for Bridgewater included a stage show based on the music of the satirical German-born song composer Kurt Weill.
Awards
Tony Award, Best Supporting Actress in a Musical, for The Wiz; three Grammy nominations; Grammy award, Best Jazz Vocal Performance, for Dear Ella, 1998.
Works
Selected discography
- Live in Paris, Affinity, 1987.
- In Montreux, Verve, 1990.
- Keeping Tradition, Verve, 1993.
- Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver, Verve, 1995.
- (with Heiner Stadler) Ecstasy, Labor, 1996.
- Dear Ella, Verve, 1998.
- Live at Yoshi's, Verve, 2000.
Further Reading
Books
- Contemporary Musicians, volume 18, Gale Research, 1997.
- Daily Telegraph (London, England), June 3, 2000, p. 8.
- Down Beat, November 1997, p. 60.
- The Gazette (Montreal, Canada), July 9, 2000, p. C2.
- New York Times, September 22, 1998, p. E2.
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 10, 1998, p. D10.
- Seattle Times, April 13, 2001, p. G17.
- http://allmusic.com
— James M. Manheim
