[Dixielandjazz] To Billie with Love - Dee Dee Bridgewater's Tribute

[Stephen G Barbone]

February 19, 2010 - NY TIMES - By Stephen Holden

A Woman and Her Band Commune With a Legend


Introducing her Billie Holiday tribute, “To Billie With Love — A  
Celebration of Lady Day,” on Wednesday evening at the Allen Room, the  
singer Dee Dee Bridgewater declared that the standard image of Holiday  
as a tragic figure shrouded in sadness was only partly true. Holiday  
was also a very funny woman who could curse like a sailor and loved to  
cook for her fellow musicians, Ms. Bridgewater insisted. She went on  
to sing a program of Holiday-associated songs, many of which she and  
her phenomenal band infused with an epic sense of expressive  
possibility.

Ms. Bridgewater’s singing has only a passing resemblance to Holiday’s  
scratchy feline sound made within a narrow range of little more than  
an octave. But her playful dead-on imitation of Holiday singing the  
opening phrases of “Fine and Mellow” showed that if she had chosen,  
Ms. Bridgewater could have done the entire show (part of Lincoln  
Center’s American Songbook series) as an eerie impersonation. But she  
had a much more ambitious agenda.

The band — Edsel Gomez on piano, Craig Handy on saxophones and flute,  
Christian McBride (substituting for Ira Coleman) on bass and Gregory  
Hutchinson on drums — was no mere backup. Many numbers were open-ended  
collaborations between Ms. Bridgewater and her musicians that assumed  
a theatrical dimension.

With her rangy chameleonic voice, Ms. Bridgewater can venture anywhere  
she pleases. Fearlessly flexing her instrument, she released  
uninhibited streams of consciousness that prodded her musicians to  
follow her into wide-open spaces where they seemed happy to go.

The most spectacular performance, on the obscure “Your Mother’s Son-in- 
Law,” was an extended, erotically charged “pas de deux,” in which Mr.  
McBride’s bass, “making love” to Ms. Bridgewater’s voice, elicited  
sounds evoking everything from laughter to a baby’s cry. Pushing her  
voice almost to the point at which her singing threatened to turn into  
an acting exercise, Ms. Bridgewater held back just enough for the  
piece to cohere as a brilliant jazz improvisation.

Mr. Handy was the other key player. Throughout the show he exhibited a  
combination of sensitivity and audacity that suggested a telepathic  
connection to Ms. Bridgewater, as he explored the timbral limits of  
the flute and saxophones in much the same way that she used her voice.

For all her stylistic extravagance, Ms. Bridgewater demonstrated  
impressive restraint in her hushed, transfixing rendition of “Strange  
Fruit.” It was done much the same way as Holiday’s classic  
interpretation, right down to the enunciation of the final word,  
“crop,” in a husky breaking voice.