***1/2 Dee Dee BridgewaterTRIBUTE TO HORACE SILVER
(Verve)
Bridgewater's studio performances
have become as vividly electric as her live
work. As rebop-crazy as the Paris jazz scene in which she's relocated,
Bridgewater wills her own hard-edged portrait -- impetuous, restless, quick to
attack the music -- onto
Horace Silver's
subtle, tempo-ambushing stride style.
Bridgewater's on-the-spot revelations toss her voice all over the place, from
moaning to careering so rapidly (sometimes she laughs at herself) that her
musicians, as they riff and fill, seem to risk turning left when she turns
right. One hears similarities to
Cassandra Wilson,
the headstrong jazz singer
beloved for setting stop-the-beat traps for her unwary musicians. But Silver
himself plays piano in "Nica's Dream" and "Song for My Father," and
Bridgewater's own pianist, Thierry Eliez, plays the rest. Together with drummer
Andre Ceccarelli and Hein Van der Geyn on bass, their response to the
chanteuse's unpredictable baring of her inner curves is to skim the rhythm and
flip the melody. They emphasize Bridgewater's willingness to travel solo to
parts unknown, but they don't give away an inch of the music's wide swing
beat.
-- Michael Freedberg
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