When I speak to Dee Dee Bridgewater, the jazz singer is preparing for a concert that evening in Des Moines, Iowa, performing classy selections from the Great American Songbook. But even though she has also recorded this material for her recent album Elemental, Bridgewater is not really in the mood. “I just don’t feel like it’s the time to be doing love songs and whimsical songs from the 1920s and 30s,” she says. “They’re beautiful, but there’s some kind of spirit and energy pushing me to sing songs saying: people, we have to protect our democracy.”
Bridgewater is one of American jazz’s foremost voices. Capable of crooning and confronting, the two-time Grammy winner has a career that spans six decades and has never stopped evolving. She cut her teeth sharing the stage with several of jazz’s greatest band leaders – Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon – before branching out into acting; singing pop and disco; and working out of France, the UK and Mali, always with a determination to create on her own terms.
At 75, an age where some singers may be content with gently reheating their earlier success, she emanates energy, idealism and splenetic anger. “I’m too old and I’ve been through too much,” she says. “I’m a product of the 1960s; I supported the Black Panther party and their community projects. Even now I deal with racism daily – every day there is something that somebody does which is racist. Even my kids don’t understand it. I cannot just sit back and be silent. I have to raise my voice.”
It will be heard at this week’s London jazz festival, where Bridgewater is backed by We Exist!, an all-female band she founded to promote women in jazz. “I got tired of hearing jazz musicians saying the same old chauvinistic crap and keeping women out,” she says. “I decided to put together an all-female band as a statement that the jazz world is still very macho.”
Bridgewater also established the Woodshed Network, now overseen by her daughter and manager Tulani, with the aim of providing female jazz musicians with “all the things they need to learn to help get their careers off the ground”. The Woodshed Network sits within the Kennedy Center, the Washington DC-based institution that is regarded as the national cultural centre of the US, and which has now been taken over by Donald Trump and his Maga acolytes. “Considering what he’s doing to the Kennedy Center, I’m unsure if [the Woodshed Network] will continue for too much longer.”
Bridgewater doesn’t mention Trump by name during our 90-minute conversation, only saying “he”, her distaste evident as she spits out the syllable. She now performs songs that reflect her fury: the likes of Billy Taylor’s civil rights anthem I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, Gene McDaniels’ Compared to What, Donny Hathaway’s Tryin’ Times and Bob Dylan’s barbed Gotta Serve Somebody.
“I couldn’t go to a No Kings protest, but I do protest songs with the We Exist! band,” she says. “The programme I am doing now started out of the war in Gaza – I watched the news and thought: I am witnessing the beginning of a genocide. I guess I have what you might call a spiritual voice which 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 in music, let the music speak for you.”
Another selection, Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, “is the song that really hits the nail on the head. It’s still relevant today as they are trying to make protesting more difficult.” Percy Mayfield’s Danger Zone, meanwhile, “is an old blues that needs to be heard, because we are in a danger zone! We have to raise our voices and vote, here and in Europe.”
Not that Bridgewater believes speaking out is free of cost. “I’m trying to wake people up through songs, but a lot of young people are oblivious to what’s going on. I’m trying to figure out a way to do it without causing too much upset. I fear this government is going to start cracking down on free speech and coming after those of us who speak out.”
Bridgewater was born Denise Garrett in 1950 in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Flint, Michigan, where her jazz musician father gave Dee Dee – a childhood nickname – an introduction to African American music. She sang in bands throughout college, then, aged 20, married jazz trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater. Their honeymoon was spent on tour with hard-bopping pianist Horace Silver, as Cecil was in his band. “The night they were playing Detroit, knowing my family would be in the audience, Cecil suggested I come out unannounced to sing on Love Vibrations. I did, and Horace, who had no idea this was going to happen, cut me off, saying: ‘Get off my stage!’”
Max Roach was even more brutal. “Cecil was playing in Max’s band and his wife and vocalist Abbey Lincoln had left. Max asked me to replace Abbey for the We Insist! suite. We did it a couple of times and then, one night, he started cursing me out, calling me ‘Abbey’, getting really abusive. I had to flee the stage.”
Despite these incidents, Lincoln’s song And It’s Supposed to Be Love is in her current set, and she speaks with compassion for her old bandleaders. “Max Roach was intense. I now realise he was bipolar. But we managed to stay friends – I’d see him whenever he came to Paris. And Horace kicking me off stage gave me the impetus to prove I could do his music.” Come 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 how to entertain audiences, how to make them laugh, from him,” while Sonny “gave me the biggest hug and said how much he liked my singing”.
After these early-70s collaborations she graduated to lead billing, but her well-received 1974 debut album Afro Blue was not a commercial success. Now a single mother living in New York, Bridgewater moved into singing pop, then won a Tony award for her performance as Glinda the Good Witch in Broadway musical The Wiz, before cutting a number of disco tracks. Acting in TV and film also kept her busy, and she was Olivier award-nominated for playing 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 almost a quarter of a century. There, Bridgewater developed into a superb interpreter of jazz standards: albums dedicated to Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Holiday all raised her profile (the last two securing those Grammy wins).
In the mid-00s, still living in France, “I used to hear all this great music they’d play on the radio there, and it was the Malian music that spoke the strongest to me. At the same time I wanted to find my African ancestry – and DNA tests were prohibitively expensive – so I decided to go there.” Arriving in Bamako she was welcomed by the “fabulous, statuesque” Oumou Sangaré, while “Cheick Tidiane Seck and Bassekou Kouyate 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 realise I want to be heard in the clubs again”. She is now making an album with Gilles Peterson and house music legend Louie Vega.
“I always wanted to be like Miles Davis – not staying in one groove but constantly changing, not staying still,” she says. She cites another inspiration, jazz singer Betty Carter, who she would visit in Brooklyn after moving to New York. “She was running her own record label, her albums lined up in the hallway in various stages of packaging, leading her own band. Now I produce my albums and I own my albums. I take control of my career so no one tries to tell me what to do.” She laughs: “Well, my daughter sometimes tries.”
• Dee Dee Bridgewater performs in the EFG London jazz festival opening gala, Jazz Voice, at Royal Festival Hall, 14 November; and with We Exist!, at the Barbican, 15 November. Elemental is out now on Mack Avenue.
