Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Dee Dee Bridgewater was born Denise Eileen Garrett on May 27, 1950 in Memphis, Tennessee but grew up in Flint, Michigan. Exposed to jazz as a young girl by her father who was a jazz trumpeter and music teacher, she was singing in rock and R&B bands by age sixteen. Two years later she enrolled at Michigan State University, then transferred to the University of Illinois and toured the Soviet Union with their jazz band in 1969. Then in 1970 she met trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, married and moved to New York City where he got a gig playing with Horace Silver.

 In the early seventies Bridgewater joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra as lead vocalist, marking her commencement of her jazz career. She subsequently performed with such greats as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and others over the course of a career spanning four plus decades.

Dee Dee Bridgewater is a two-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, a Tony Award winning actress, host of NPR’s Jazzset, and a United Nations Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization. She has paid musical tribute to Ella Fitzgerald with her 1997 Grammy winning Dear Ella recording, to Horace Silver with her Love and Peace, and Billie Holiday with her 2010 Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959) To Billie With Love from Dee Dee.

Her album This Is New investigated the music of Kurt Weill, sang French classics on J’ai Deux Amours and brought the contributions of African musicians of Mali alive with Red Earth. She has performed on nearly every major stage around the world and continues to record, perform and tour.

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