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Dee Dee Bridgewater is calling from a bustling street in her beloved Paris. In the background, people chatter and sirens wail. It’s the legendary vocalist’s first trip back since 2019 to this city she previously called home for more than two decades. ’
“Living in France, there is exposure to a lot of different cultures that one wouldn’t ordinarily have in the United States,” says Bridgewater, who will appear with pianist Bill Charlap on an SCP Jazz double bill April 29 (also featuring the supergroup Artemis). “So I had a lot of different musical influences there that I didn’t have in the United States.”
Although Bridgewater, who grew up in Flint, Michigan, now feels “very comfortable” in America, that hasn’t necessarily been an artistic boon. “I have not felt as creative since I’ve been back in the United States, which is 12 years now, as I did in France,” she says. “Just walking down the street in Paris, you are looking at people from different countries. It’s a huge melting plot that is tangible.
“Right now I see Arab people. I see some people that are definitely from Black Africa. In France, we have Black Africans and North Africans. So there’s a whole different kind of exposure that I have from being in Europe. And I can turn on the radio and hear music from different countries. There’s more of an eclectic availability to music and to art in general here that one has to kind of look for in the United States.”
Critical though it is, that’s a considerably less jaundiced view than the one she expressed to Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich in 1996. “I found out that I had started to feel completely stunted artistically in the States,” she told him in this remarkable profile. “In the entertainment business, I had spent all my time listening to people telling me what I needed to do if I wanted to have that hit, if I wanted to have that success. I forgot who I was.”
Bridgewater adds, “I don’t think I even would have come back to jazz singing if I hadn’t gone to France.”
Her American fans from coast to coast are no doubt grateful she did. Or they should be. An NEA Jazz Master, three-time Grammy winner and recipient of too many other musical honors to mention, Bridgewater, 71, has only improved with age. Her versatile voice sounds better than ever and her stage presence is electric during sets low-key and high-octane alike.
After an extended pandemic-induced absence, this performance last summer at the Jazz & Heritage Center in her current hometown of New Orleans was a perfect example of the latter. Dressed in colorful custom garments, outsized jewelry and flashy shades, Bridgewater danced around, bantered with her fellow musicians, frequently engaged the audience, spoke English with a theatrical French accent and in general seemed to be having a ton of fun. Perhaps not surprisingly to those who know of her penchant for promoting talented young artists, she even launched into a funky-sexy riff about her stellar bass player Amina Scott.
While her Symphony Center performance will surely be more subdued, it won’t be any less compelling. Possessed of a famously magnetic personality and eminently adaptable to her musical environment, Bridgewater can dazzle and charm in any space. Whether climbing inside of a timeless classic or performing an original composition (she’ll do both in Chicago), it’s all about being in the moment, she says, and telling a story — one that’s invariably, though not always consciously, shaped to varying degrees by the highs and lows of her own remarkable life.
“You know how we always say, ‘Too bad, the great singers are all gone. There’s no more Ella, no Sarah’?” said Andre Menard, co-director of the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal, to the Tribune’s Reich more than a quarter-century ago. “When I heard her, I thought, ‘Well, she fits in there somewhere among the greats.’ ”
Some truths are timeless.
