I can’t be silent. ‘I’ve been through a lot’: Dee Dee Bridgewater on singing with the greats – and taking on MAGA with jazz | jazz

WWhen I spoke to Dee Dee Bridgewater, the jazz singer was preparing for a concert that evening in Des Moines, Iowa, where he will perform uplifting selections from the Great American Songbook. But even though she also recorded this material for her latest album Elemental, Bridgewater isn’t really in the mood. “I don’t feel like this is the right time to be singing love songs and exotic songs from the 1920s and 1930s,” she says. “They’re beautiful, but there’s a kind of spirit and energy that drives me to sing songs that say, ‘People, we have to protect our democracy.'”

Bridgewater is one of the most prominent voices of American jazz. Able to croon and stand up, the two-time Grammy winner has had a career spanning six decades that has never stopped evolving. She cut her teeth sharing the stage with many of jazz’s greatest bandleaders – Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon – before branching out into acting; Pop and disco vocals; She works out of France, the UK and Mali, always with a determination to create on her own terms.

At 75, an age at which some singers might be content to gently reheat their past successes, she exudes energy, idealism and splenic fury. “I’m old and I’ve been through a lot,” she says. “I am a product of the 1960s; I supported the Black Panther Party and its community projects. Even now I deal with racism daily – every day there is something someone does that is racist. Even my children don’t understand it. I can’t sit and be silent. I have to speak up.”

She will be heard at the London Jazz Festival this week, where Bridgewater supports We Exist!, an all-female band she founded to encourage women in jazz. “I’m tired of hearing jazz musicians repeating the same old chauvinistic bullshit and turning women away,” she says. “I decided to form an all-female band to confirm that the jazz world is still very macho.”

Bridgewater also created the Woodshed Network, now overseen by her daughter and director Tolani, with the goal of providing female jazz musicians with “all the things they need to learn to help launch their careers.” The Woodshed network is located inside the Kennedy Center, the Washington, D.C.-based institution that is considered the national cultural center of the United States, and which has now been taken over by Donald Trump and his MAGA collaborators. “Given what he’s doing at the Kennedy Center, I’m not so sure [the Woodshed Network] “It will last too long.”

Bridgewater did not mention Trump by name during our 90-minute conversation, only saying “he,” and her distaste was evident as she uttered the clip. Now she performs songs that reflect her anger: like Billie Taylor’s civil rights anthem “I Wish I Knew What It’d Be Like to Be Free,” Gene McDaniels’ “Compared to What,” Donny Hathaway’s “Train Times,” and Bob Dylan’s “Somebody’s Gotta Serve.”

“I wasn’t able to go to the No Kings protest, but I’m playing protest songs with the band We Exist!” she says. “The program I’m presenting now started from the war in Gaza – I watched the news and thought: I’m witnessing the beginning of genocide. I think I have what you might call a spiritual voice that sometimes speaks to me very loudly. I was sitting in my living room watching the news and crying, and this voice said to me: Put it to music, and let the music speak for you.”

Another selection, “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone, “is the song that really hit the nail on the head. It’s still relevant today as they try to make protesting more difficult.” On the other hand, Percy Mayfield’s film “Danger Zone” “is old sad music that must be heard, because we are in a danger zone! We must raise our voices and vote, here and in Europe.”

Bridgewater doesn’t believe speaking out is free. “I try to wake people up through songs, but many young people are oblivious to what is happening. I am trying to figure out a way to do it without causing too much discomfort. I fear that this government will start suppressing freedom of expression and go after those who speak out.”

Denise Garrett was born in Bridgewater in 1950 in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Flint, Michigan, where her jazz musician father Dee Dee — her childhood nickname — gave her an introduction to African-American music. She sang in bands throughout college, then at age 20 married trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater. He spent his honeymoon on tour with pianist Horace Silver, in whose band Cecil was. “The night they were playing Detroit, when he knew my family would be in the audience, Cecil suggested that I walk out unannounced to sing ‘Love Vibrations.’ I did, and Horace, who had no idea this was going to happen, interrupted me, saying, ‘Get off the stage!’”

Max Roach was even more brutal. “Cecil was playing in Max’s band and his wife and singer Abby Lincoln had left. Max asked me to replace Abby in the set of We Insist! We did that a few times, and then, one night, he started cursing at me, calling me ‘Abby’, and became very abusive. I had to flee the stage.”

Despite these events, “Lincoln and It’s Meant to Be Love” is present in her current repertoire, and she speaks sympathetically to her old band leaders. “Max Roach was intense. I realize now that he was bipolar. But we managed to remain friends – I would see him whenever he came to Paris. Horace throwing me off the stage gave me the impetus to prove that I could play his music.” In 1995, they recorded together for the album Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver.

Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins were easier company. “Dizzy was the sweetest – I learned from him how to entertain a crowd, how to make them laugh,” while “Sonny gave me the biggest hugs and said how much he loved my singing.”

After these collaborations in the early 1970s, she graduated to lead bills, but her well-received 1974 debut album, Afro Blue, was not a commercial success. Now a single mother living in New York, Bridgewater transitioned to pop singing, then won a Tony Award for her performance as Glinda the Good Witch in the Broadway musical The Wiz, before cutting a number of disco tracks. Acting in television and film also kept her busy, and she was nominated for an Olivier Award for her role as Billie Holiday in the 1986 West End musical Lady Day, before marriage to French concert promoter Jean-Marie Durand led her to settle in Paris for nearly a quarter of a century. There, Bridgewater developed into a great interpreter of jazz standards: albums dedicated to Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Holiday all raised her profile (the latter two songs earned her two Grammy wins).

In the mid-2000s, when I was still living in France, “I was hearing all this wonderful music they were playing on the radio over there, and it was the Malian music that spoke so strongly to me. At the same time, I wanted to find my African ancestors – and DNA tests were obscenely expensive – so I decided to go there.” Upon her arrival in Bamako, she was greeted by the “gorgeous and statuesque” Oumou Sangari, while Cheikh Tidiane Seck and Bassekou Kouyaté challenged me to sing griot songs, resulting in the rich West African jazz fusion of 2007’s “Red Earth: A Malian Journey.”

Today, Bridgewater says she has no intention of slowing down – “This is how I make my money, baby, I live out of hotels!” – and an appearance at the UK’s We Out Here festival in 2024, alongside DJs and producers, “made me realize that I wanted my voice to be heard in clubs again.” Now she’s making an album with Gil Peterson and house music legend Louie Vega.

“I always wanted to be like Miles Davis – never staying in one groove, constantly changing, never staying still,” she says. She cites another inspiration: jazz singer Betty Carter, whom she would visit in Brooklyn after moving to New York. “She was running her own record label, had her albums lined up in the hallway in various stages of packaging, and led her own band. Now I produce my albums and own my albums. I control my career so no one tries to tell me what to do.” “Well, my daughter tries sometimes,” she laughs.