Bridgewater aces SFJazz opener
SFJazz would have been hard-pressed to find an artist better suited than Dee Dee Bridgewater to kick off the organization’s sixth season on Thursday, Sept. 7, in its sumptuously appointed jazz center.
A major figure since the early 1970s, she’s collaborated with a pantheon of departed jazz giants, and she’s deeply invested in championing the rising generation of players. Recently named a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, Bridgewater embodies jazz history as a boundlessly inventive improviser committed to the notion that serious music can be seriously entertaining.
Thursday’s opening performance in a five-concert, fournight run in the Miner Auditorium revisited Bridgewater’s Grammy Award-winning celebration of Ella Fitzgerald, 1997’s “Dear Ella,” with a fearless, often sublime program of reimagined standards. Like Fitzgerald, she can sound coy and girlish, but Bridgewater contains multitudes, and the Tony Award winner (for creating the role of Glinda in “The Wiz”) unleashed an array of
characters throughout the evening.
But before she even started singing, Bridgewater threw a little teasing shade at SFJazz founder and Executive Artistic Director Randall Kline for requesting her residency closing program on Sunday, Sept. 10, feature songs associated with Josephine Baker, who belonged to the jazz age but was not a jazz singer.
Bridgewater is a jazz singer to her marrow, a chronic oversharer, flirty, ribald and utterly in the moment. She opened with a series of duets with Memphis guitarist Charlton Johnson, evoking Fitzgerald’s late-career partnership with guitar virtuoso Joe Pass. It was a daring and exposed setting for a cold open, and after a dicey “Satin Doll” and a not so bossa-ish take on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave,” they hit their stride on a voluptuous version of “Moonlight in Vermont” and an accelerating “Cherokee” that started as a saunter and ended in a tagteam sprint.
With Johnson departing, Bridgewater’s trio took the stage, and she made sure that the audience caught the names of the remarkable young pianist Carmen Staaf, rising bassist Tabari Lake and veteran drummer Adonis “Sweetness” Rose. Rather than featuring them on solos, she gave the young musicians plenty of room to make a lasting impression as she tore through a wordless scat version of Sonny Rollins’ calypso-inflected “St. Thomas,” facing off with each player to trade phrases.
With her voice gaining pliability and strength throughout the evening, Bridgewater kept things dangerous. A galloping arrangement of “Surrey With the Fringe On Top” flirted with disaster as she seemed on the verge of careening out of her range. Breathing a sigh of relief when she landed safely, she admitted that she started the tune an octave high.
“I can’t help being honest. What you see is what you get,” she said, which is one reason why Bridgewater is such a riveting performer. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen next either.
A deliriously playful “Mack the Knife” opened as a duet with Lake, who displayed a keen melodic sensibility while taking care of the shifting pulse. Though the song was a Fitzgerald mainstay, it also brought to mind one of Bridgewater’s best albums, 2002’s criminally underappreciated Kurt Weill project “This Is New.”
Bridgewater opened the second set singing a few impromptu lines from “I Will Survive,” pretending to be Gloria Gaynor. “I was a disco diva,” she said, but she kept the focus on Fitzgerald and her centennial celebration. In one particularly sweet interlude she imitated Fitzgerald’s famous impression of Louis Armstrong, delivering “Basin Street Blues” in Satchmo’s gravelly croon.
Like Fitzgerald, Bridgewater’s bravura scatting and rhythmic dexterity earned the big cheers, despite the fact that she’s often at her most arresting delivering sensuously levitating ballads. One highlight was her dreamy “Stairway to the Stars,” complete with an “instrumental” solo that perfectly captured the burnished glow of a muted trombone.
She closed the show with an extended romp through Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail” that brought Johnson back onto the stage. In some ways, it was a preview of coming attractions, as the guitarist, who spent years with Bobby “Blue” Bland and the Count Basie Orchestra, is a key component of her new project exploring the soul and R&B of her hometown.
Bridgewater celebrates the release of her new album “Memphis … Yes, I’m Ready” with two concerts on Saturday, Sept. 9, (a program she also brings to the Monterey Jazz Festival on Sept. 16) and concludes the SFJazz run Sunday with the aforementioned Baker tribute.
While she might not feel much musical kinship with Baker, Bridgewater poured her adoration of Fitzgerald into her encore, a tender rendition of Kenny Burrell’s earnest song “Dear Ella.” Blowing a kiss to the circa-1947 photo of Fitzgerald projected behind the stage, she paid the First Lady of Jazz the highest compliment by remaking every song with her own bodacious sound.