Dee Dee Bridgewater: This Is New (CD)

Dee Dee Bridgewater (geb. 1950)

CD

CD (Compact Disc)

Conventional CD, playable with all CD players and computer drives, but also with most SACD or multiplayers.

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Label:: EmArcy
Year of recording ca.:: 2002
UPC/EAN:: 0602527040400
Release date:: 2.6.2009

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AFTER FOUR YEARS OF TOURING WITH "DEAR ELLA", her wildly popular double Grammy® Award winning tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater has set her sights on new challenges. This is New finds her plunging headfirst into a different songbook— that of trailblazing German theater composer Kurt Weill. His songs not only represent the highest level of musical craftsmanship, but they are perfectly suited to Bridgewater’s intensity of expression and keen wit. She is the first vocalist in jazz history to build an entire album from them.

The idea percolated for almost two years before Bridgewater entered the studio. Some of Weill’s songs were already comfortably familiar; “Mack the Knife,” a perennial favorite was part of Bridgewater’s Ella repertory among a handful of Weill’s time-honored ballads, also came to her attention via that great lady of song. Still, Bridgewater did not fully grasp the breadth of his work. An invitation to perform at a lavish centennial celebration for the composer in Wroclaw, Poland helped to open her eyes.

“I was struck by the melodies of these different songs,” she remembers. “Even though I couldn’t understand the language they were singing in, I could still feel the emotion, the power. The music was very dramatic and I fell in love with it.” When the Montreal Jazz Festival 2000 asked her to prepare something special, the choice was obvious. Her performance was a hit and recording project developed as a result.

Bridgewater was equally enchanted with the unique musical settings at the centennial, which ran the gamut from pop and rock to cabaret and jazz. Weill’s songs may come from musical theater productions, but their versatility has long been proven. They have been performed by such diverse talents as Jessye Norman, Willie Nelson, Ute Lemper, and the Doors (whose version of “Alabama Song” topped charts in the late 1960s). The composer comfortably occupies the crossroads between several musical genres, a position that sparked criticism during his lifetime.

Educated in Berlin, Weill (1900-50) studied classically and was already well established when his first opera premiered in 1926. His concern for audience tastes and the desire to create "freer, lighter, and simpler" works, however, took him on a radically different course than most of his peers. He devoted himself to musical theater, beginning an association with playwright Bertolt Brecht. His memorable tunes and the influence of popular music on works like The Threepenny Opera shocked the avant-garde; the charge that Weill had "sold out" dogged him throughout his career. Fleeing Nazi Germany, he immigrated to the United States in 1935. His successes on Broadway – including One Touch of Venus and Lost in the Stars – owe a debt to the superb American lyricists, poets, and playwrights with whom he collaborated: Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, and Maxwell Anderson.

Like Weill, Bridgewater’s career has bridged musical genres. She earned her first professional experience as a member of the legendary Thad Jones / Mel Louis Big Band. Throughout the 70s, she performed with such jazz notables as Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, and Dizzy Gillespie. After a foray into the pop world during the 1980s, she relocated to Paris and began to turn her attention back to jazz.

Bridgewater’s Weill songbook would do him proud; the songs are both artfully performed and destined to have a wide appeal. She approaches the spare string arrangement of “My Ship” with classic elegance and “Speak Low” with appropriate softness. By contrast, “The Saga of Jenny” achieves a bluesy swing, “Stranger Here Myself” boasts a hard-bop groove, and “September Song” gets outright funky, topped by young lion Antonio Hart’s burning saxophone solo. Other songs take more exotic twists. “Bilbao,” a nostalgic, extended travelogue, opens with a stunning flamenco interlude by Louis Winsberg, whom Bridgewater describes as “the Pat Metheny of France.”

The electric samba of the title song and contemplative “Lost in the Stars” were arranged by Thierry Eliez, Bridgewater’s pianist for the last 12 years. The rest, however, were crafted by Cecil Bridgewater, a renowned trumpeter and Dee Dee’s first husband. Dee Dee herself has taken an active role in the evolution of these charts through performance. “I wanted a nonet formation,” she says, “because I knew that I could change it up, give it different sounds and colors, and therefore treat each song like a little vignette.”

As for her future plans with the material, Bridgewater envisioned a true hybrid between jazz and musical theater. “I’m finding personalities for each of the songs and it’s starting to turn into a show,” she reveals. “These songs are fabulous to act out. They’re just so much fun.” (deedeebridgewater. com)