Dee Dee Bridgewater: Fireworks and Fever

The big news out of Montreal's Jazz Festival the past couple years has been the singing of Dee Dee Bridgewater: sharp, snazzy, and explosive. In a concert at Boston's Berklee Performance Center last Sunday billed as "A Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald," Bridgewater was all of that and more. Performing with the Jacky Terrasson Trio, she sang the gamut of jazz song from deep ballads to funky routines to all-out headbangs, showing herself to be sultry and crude, tender and tough, a lady and a demon.

Being comfortable in the tradition, she sang the main body of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" kittenish in the manner of Sarah Vaughan, then took the coda as a soulfully horny swoon entirely her own. Her song selection certainly paid homage to Fitzgerald -- "Undecided," "Love for Sale," "Miss Otis Regrets," for example -- but after singing a few touches in Ella's flirtatious manner, she bent every song to her own funky, hard-bop, joke-making shape.

Jazz song for Bridgewater is a raucous, bash-the-walls, body-walloping affair. In that spirit she and her trio used samba rhythms and walking-bass lines and tempos as fast as the hardest hard bop can handle. She also showed her chops as a scat singer and improviser. In "Love for Sale," she sang the drummer Ali Jackson's droll brush work back at him (at one point in their duet, his left brush moved the cymbals only to pull back for a couple notes: Bridgewater jumped on it). During the scat break of "Silk Stockings" she imitated the dulled tones of a muted cornet.

In jazz singing today the terms "down-home guts" and "soulful cries" usually mean Cassandra Wilson. Bridgewater has clearly taken up Wilson's syntax. In the early 1990s she sang with much more polish and few digressions. But Bridgewater's approach to sweat-and-guts music is less Mississippi blues than it is John Coltrane. Her hard tones, like his, feel knife-edged, even dangerous; her soft notes are the last gasp of some terrific inner effort. She showed her Coltrane-ism (and her trio its melodic hard bop, full of switchbacks and inside-outs on the melody) in "Cottontail," "Love for Sale," and "Cherokee." In the same vein she smoothed her way grandly over the high-society dance tune "It Was Just One of Those Things."

But Bridgewater can never really be called smooth. Tempestuous whether singing, gesturing, or talking to pianist Terrasson (with whom she has played off and on, she told the audience, since meeting him in Paris in 1988), she shifted style from enjoyably pretentious like Josephine Baker to romantically on fire. There were no comfortable middles in her performance. Ellington, whose music she has just paid tribute to in her new Prelude to a Kiss: The Duke Ellington Album (Philips), would probably not approve. The Duke's music might have alluded to exotic places and sensuous feelings, but it was flawlessly self-possessed; his solos never leaned, his rhythm sections did not bend, his melodies murmured all night long without developing bags under the eyes. Bridgewater's "Mood Indigo," from the Prelude CD, leaned and bent and showed bags galore and worse. Her blues mood was a sleepless night, her loneliness was a full-body hurt and not just a shrug of the shoulders. Ellington was unflappable, cool, the dandy no matter how much it hurt. Bridgewater let all that stuff go. She wore loud, tie-dye colors. Her head was shaved. Her soul was both. The music, too. It was a fireworks and fever evening.

-- Michael Freedberg