Above: Dee Dee Bridgewater and friends entertain a crowd at the Gem Theater on Saturday. Photo by Bill Browlee/Special to The Star.
Four decades into a career characterized by restlessness, Dee Dee Bridgewater seems to have found her musical and spiritual home.
She shared that new world with an audience of about 250 people Saturday night at the Gem Theater, a show that opened the American Jazz Museum's 11th annual "Jammin' At the Gem" season.
Bridgewater showcased an innovative sound, simultaneously ancient and entirely original. She has transplanted her jazz roots to African soil. A jazz-based band was joined by six masterful musicians from Mali and Senegal.
Bridgewater's concept is not a mere feel-good cultural exchange or polite academic exercise. Attending Saturday's concert was like witnessing the inception of an extraordinary new art form. It was world music in the best possible sense- when reunited with its African roots, America's jazz, blues, gospel and Latin sounds conceived uncharted musical paths.
The continental connection was best explored on the raucous "Children Go 'Round." Building on a Malian rhythm later echoed by John Lee Hooker, Baba Sissoko conjured Jimi Hendrix with a raging solo on a ngoni, the banjo's African ancestor. Bridgewater scatted along like a possessed Ella Fitzgerald.
"If you haven't figured it out by now," Bridgewater exclaimed. "Jazz and blues here in the U.S.A. are just extensions of the Malian sound."
One of Bridgewater's many courageous decisions was to share the stage with two stunningly gifted Malian vocalists. Even though Bridgewater easily evokes both Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin, she was no match for the exquisitely rapturous voice of Kabine Kouyate and the gorgeous, gentler style of Mamani Keita.
Bridgewater's formidable skill as an actress -- she won a Tony Award in 1975 -- served her well. Her most incendiary vocal was delivered during a devastatingly bleak reading of Nina Simone's "Four Women." For all her innovation and cultural impact, it's unlikely that Simone ever delivered a concert as monumentally transcendent as Bridgewater's show on Saturday.
The evening's only disappointment: The acoustically brilliant Gem was only half full. The two-and-a-half hour performance was subversive and experimental but also riveting and emotionally engaging.
| Bill Brownlee, Special to The Star
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