The Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival is on the way - September 18-21 with an impressive array of jazz artists - including some phenomenal singers - including a Grammy-winning, Broadway and jazz star who has traveled the world - Dee Dee Bridgewater.
We set up to do a pre-festival interview with Dee Dee - a normal thing we do, visiting with artists we’ve just discovered and also performers we’ve talked with - and perhaps introduced on stage - before.
This interview ended up being different.
The day before our interview this week, NEA jazz master vocalist Sheila Jordan died. She was 96 and had been in hospice, recently. Dee Dee Bridgewater and Sheila had become good friends over the past 4-plus decades and it was a loss that Dee Dee was just beginning to process,
We talk about Sheila, about the 1988 jazz opera, “Cosmopolitan Greetings,” premiered in Hamburg, Germany, which brought the works of Alan Ginsburg together with Dee Dee, Sheila Jordan and Mark Murphy, George Gruntz and designer and theater artist Ropert Wilson in an exploration of the life of Bessie Smith. The band included Don Cherry, Howard Johnson, Larry Schneider, Mike Richmond and Adam Nussbaum along with Big Band of the North German Radio, led by Mr. Gruntz. from that concert, forward, Dee Dee and Sheila were friends.
There’s much more in our conversation, including here new duo project with pianist Bill Charlap, “Elemental,'“ and the program she’s bringing to the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, “We Exist,” a powerful statement about women in jazz.
Dee Dee also shares how she considers herself a Jazz singer, which gave her special privileges during her 2 1/2 year run on Broadway with the musical, “The Wiz,” and why Thad Jones (the co-leader of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra) told her to NOT listen to other jazz singers.
Much conversation - and music of Dee Dee Bridgwater and Sheila Jordan on The Scene - an hourlong radio show - Thursday night at 6, Friday and Saturday at noon, Sunday at 5 on WZUM
Dee Dee Bridgewater
Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bill Charlap
Dee Dee Bridgewater Interview on WZUM, The Scene