Though about 2,000 musicians played roughly 400 concerts at the Montreal International Jazz Festival last July, one performer alone stole the city’s heart.
With the festival’s largest auditorium (the Salle Wilfrid-Pelleier) packed to capacity, with several video cameras recording the event for subsequent broadcast, singer Dee Dee Bridgewater turned an audience of sophisticated and reserved jazz listeners into a house of screaming fans.
Never mind that Bridgewater’s concert tribute to jazz legend Horace Silver nearly fizzled in the 11th hour, when the revered pianist-composer, who had been scheduled to perform with her, couldn’t make the show.
Though Bridgewater had the unenviable task of telling a houseful of Silver fans that their hero had canceled, she proceeded to deliver one of the most dynamic performances of her career, effectively launching a North American comeback after 10 years of artistic exile in France.
“I was so nervous for that show, because I thought Horace was coming, and I really was looking forward to being with him on stage–I thought that would really be the consecration of consecrations,” said Bridgewater, the morning after her come-from-behind triumph. The success of that concert has led to a comeback tour of the United States, with a Chicago appearance Nov. 28 at the Jazz Buffet.
“I was so afraid of getting bad reviews that I put on my dark glasses this morning when I went down to the (festival’s) press room to look at the newspapers,” continued the singer. “I didn’t want anybody to be able to read it in my eyes, if the reviews were bad.”
Bridgewater needn’t have worried. Her rambunctious yet musically alert performances of Silver standards such as “Tokyo Blues,” “Doddlin’,” “Song for My Father,” “Filthy McNasty” and “Nica’s Dream” won enthusiastic ovations, demands for several encores and rave reviews. What’s more, the Canadian Broadcast Corp. rushed the videotape of her Silver marathon onto national TV a few days later.
Though Bridgewater had played shows for smaller audiences at the Montreal Festival over the preceding two years, this was the crown jewel, the curtain-raiser for her return to the United States.
A decade earlier, she had fled the country with few plans for the future.
“It’s very clear why I left,” said Bridgewater, who has become one of the best-selling jazz singers in Europe during her years away from home.
“I left because I was in the middle of a very ugly divorce (from trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater), but I also had started to feel artistically completely stunted.
“Ever since I had been in the entertainment business, I spent all of my time listening to people tell me what I needed to do. If I wanted to have that hit, I had to do this; if I wanted to do this, I had to do that.
“I felt ill at ease in the States, and I just needed to get out and find me, first as a woman and a person, and then as an artist.”
No doubt Bridgewater, who was born in Memphis 45 years ago, had been through the mill. Midwestern jazz singer in the ’60s, wife of New York trumpeter Bridgewater in the ’70s, Los Angeles pop vocalist in the ’80s, her artistic and personal identity seemed perpetually in flux. Though she won considerable critical acclaim as a singer with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra in the mid-’70s and as an actor in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” (which won her a Tony Award in 1975), she also suffered the indignities typically accorded jazz artists in the post-’50s era, when the music took a downward slide in popularity.
“In Europe, they had respect for all the art forms, including jazz,” said Bridgewater, who originally went to France to star in “Lady Day,” a show based on the life and music of Billie Holiday. “The play was a hit, and when we finished doing it in Paris, my daughters came to me and said, `Mom, we want to speak to you.’
“So we were alone, just we three girls, and we sat down at the kitchen table, and I’ll never forget what happened. They were 8 and 14 at the time, and they said, `Mommy, we’ve decided we want to stay.’
“And I said, `You want to stay here?’
“And they said, `Yes, we like it here, we don’t want to go back to America. We feel safe here, we can do what we want.’
“Two weeks after that I met the (French) man who is now my husband, and we’ve lived together ever since.”
For Bridgewater, the decade in Europe apparently was as therapeutic personally as it was inspiring artistically. She quickly became a noted jazz figure on the continent, hosting her own TV and radio shows in Paris and bypassing small clubs to work larger concert halls. Her European recordings typically sell in the 80,000-plus range, impressive numbers for any bona fide jazz artist.
Over the past couple of years, Bridgewater decided to try to re-establish herself on this side of the Atlantic.
“We were quite taken with Dee Dee when she first played our festival” in ’93, said Montreal International Jazz Festival co-founder Andre Menard.
“So each year we decided to bring her back, and each time the audience response meant we had to put her in a bigger hall.”
With that kind of reaction, Bridgewater decided to put her toe back into the turbulent waters of the American music industry, singing a cameo last year on the nationally televised “Carnegie Hall Salutes the Jazz Masters” concert. Her exuberant scat singing on that telecast, and in her first domestically released recording in years, “Keeping Tradition” (Verve), showed American listeners just how much she had matured as singer and artist.
Similarly, her newest recording, “Love and Peace” (Verve), which is devoted to music of Horace Silver, captures Bridgewater at the height of her powers.
“I’m really proud of that album, and I play it often here at the house,” says Silver, who played piano on a couple of the tracks.
“Dee Dee scats wonderfully on the record, the band plays beautifully, and I’d have to call her one of the most important interpreters of my music.”
For Bridgewater, the all-Silver disc represented a culmination of a journey that had had several stark disappointments along the way.
“I always wanted to do a tribute to somebody while he is alive and can appreciate it and reap the benefits of it–if it works,” said Bridgewater.
“Because everybody tends to do the tribute albums when somebody dies, which to me is morbid and not necessary. We say, `Yeah, they’re OK,’ while they’re living, and then all of a sudden they become these great demigods when they die.
“So I was going to do an album with Dizzy (Gillespie), and then he got sick and died.
“I was going to do an album with Thad (Jones), we were putting it together, and then he died!
“Horace’s music I’ve loved since I was a kid, so I really wanted to make a recording devoted to his work, which I consider way ahead of its time.
“So Horace came out to Paris for a week and just hung out at the studio, and that gave me the security that I needed. He was this serene presence, it was really so peaceful having him there–it was like a benediction.”
Whether listeners in the United States will welcome Bridgewater with the same kind of enthusiasm she has inspired in Europe and in Montreal remains to be seen.
“I’m so scared,” said Bridgewater, “because what I’ve found out from doing just a few (preliminary) gigs in the States is that I’m psychologically still very fragile. I still am not that keen on the way jazz is treated, on the whole, in America.
“When I met with some music industry people in the States, they said to me, `You’ve got to get some American players (in Bridgewater’s French band).’
“I said, `You would never even dare tell a musician who he should have in his band. Why do you think you have the right to tell me who I need to work with, just because I’m a singer?’
“In Europe it’s so different. They have a strong fascination with black America, a deep respect for jazz music and a more relaxed attitude in general.
“I just finished doing `Cabaret,’ as the first black Sally Bowles, wearing a blonde wig and bouncing all over the stage in this musical. And the critics said my new title is `Eclectic Dee Dee, the Josephine Baker of the ’90s.’
“And I said to myself, `This is it, they got it, they understand.’ “
