Dee Dee Bridgewater - Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie With Love From Dee Dee
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Artist:Dee Dee Bridgewater
Album Title: Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie With Love From Dee Dee
Audio CD (March 2, 2010)
Original Release Date: 2010
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Emarcy / Pgd
Genre: Jazz/Singer
Styles: Bop/Hard Bop/Cool
Source: Original CD
Scans Included
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Codec: Flac 1.2.1; Level 8
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Size Torrent: 338 Mb
Tracks
1 Lady sings the blues 3:30 anno: 2009
Billie Holiday [autore] - Herbie Nichols [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] -
Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
2 All of me 2:58 anno: 2009
Seymour Simons [autore] - Gerald Marks [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] -
Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
3 Good morning heartache 5:10 anno: 2009
Irene Higginbotham [autore] - Ervin M. Drake [autore] - Dan Fisher [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal]
- Edsel Gomez [piano] - Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [clar] - Edsel Gomez
[arr]
4 Lover man 4:43 anno: 2009
James E. Davis [autore] - Roger J. "Ram" Ramirez [autore] - James Sherman [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater
[vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] - Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel
Gomez [arr]
5 You've changed :10 anno: 2009
Bill Carey [autore] - Carl Fischer [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] -
Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
6 Miss Brown to you 2:12 anno: 2009
Ralph Rainger [autore] - Leo Robin [autore] - Richard A. Whiting [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] -
Edsel Gomez [piano] - Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel Gomez
[arr]
7 Don't explain 6:14 anno: 2009
Billie Holiday [autore] - Arthur jr. Herzog [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] -
Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [fl] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
8 Fine and mellow 4:54 anno: 2009
Billie Holiday [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] - Christian McBride [bass] -
Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
9 Mother's son-in-law 2:46 anno: 2009
Mann Holiner [autore] - Alberta Nichols [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] -
Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
10 God bless the child 5:13 anno: 2009
Billie Holiday [autore] - Arthur jr. Herzog [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] -
Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [sax] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
11 A foggy day 4:33 anno: 2009
Ira Gershwin [autore] - George Gershwin [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] -
Christian McBride [bass] - Lewis Nash [drums] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
12 Strange fruit 4:16 anno: 2009
Lewis Allan [autore] - Dee Dee Bridgewater [vocal] - Edsel Gomez [piano] - Christian McBride [bass] -
Lewis Nash [drums] - James Carter [clar] - Edsel Gomez [arr]
Total Time: 51:53
Personnel
Dee Dee Bridgewater (vocals),
Edsel Gomez (piano),
James Carter (saxophones,
Christian McBride (bass),
Lewis Nash (drums)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2OxgWyoAY&feature=related
Biography
Born Denise Eileen Garrett in Memphis, Tennessee, she grew up in Flint, Michigan. Her father, Matthew
Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher at Manassas High School, and through his play, Denise was
exposed to jazz early on. At the age of sixteen, she was a member of a rock and rhythm'n'blues trio,
singing in clubs in Michigan. At 18, she studied at the Michigan State University before she went to the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With their jazz band, she toured the Soviet Union in 1969. The
next year, she met trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, and after their marriage, they moved to New York City,
where Cecil played in Horace Silver's band.
In 1971, Bridgewater joined the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestra as the lead vocalist. The next years marked
the beginning of her jazz career, and she performed with many of the great jazz musicians of the time,
such as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, and others. In 1974, her first own
album, entitled Afro Blue, appeared, and she also performed on Broadway in the musical The Wiz. For her
role as Glinda the Good Witch she won a Tony Award in 1975 as "best featured actress", and the musical
also won the 1976 Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album.
She subsequently appeared in several other stage productions. After touring France in 1984 with the
musical Sophisticated Ladies, she moved to Paris in 1986. The same year saw her in Lady Day as Billie
Holiday, for which role she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award. In the late 1980s and early
1990s, she returned from the world of musical to jazz. She performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in
1990, and four years later, she finally collaborated with Horace Silver, whom she had admired since long,
and released the album Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver. Her 1997 tribute album Dear Ella won
her the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and the 1998 album Live at Yoshi's was also worth a
Grammy nomination. She has also explored on This is New the songs of Kurt Weill, and, on her next album
J'ai Deux Amours, the French Classics. Her album Red Earth was published in 2007 and it features
Africa-inspired themes.
________________________________________________________________________________________
review
Even though she portrayed Billie Holiday onstage in Paris and London some years ago, apparently to rave
reviews, Dee Dee Bridgewater doesn't try to channel her on Eleanora Fagan (1915–1959): To Billie With Love
From Dee Dee Bridgewater (DDB/Emarcy). If anything, when not evoking the raspiness of Holiday's later
years, as on "Don't Explain," Bridgewater often seems to be going out of her way not to sound like
Holiday, even in passing. This is admirable, but only in theory, because it brings Eleanora Fagan face to
face with a dilemma confronting all jazz "tribute" albums: If the iconic figure to whom you're
genuflecting was as much identified with an approach to material as with the material itself, then doesn't
approaching those tunes differently risk sacrificing something absolutely essential?
"Diana Ross's singing is too close," Pauline Kael complained of the 1972 movie Lady Sings the Blues. "When
she sings the songs that Holiday's phrasing fixed in our minds and imitates that phrasing, our memories
are blurred. I felt as if I were losing something." Afterward, Kael lamented, "You have to retrieve her at
the phonograph—you have to do restoration work on your own past." Inasmuch as the movie loosed an
avalanche of Holiday reissues, Kael's worry that a coy approximation would drive the genuine article from
memory proved groundless. But memory can become generic, and to the extent that Holiday's small, wounding
voice has blended with more robust black female voices in the public mind, don't blame Ross for supposedly
coming too close—blame others who seem to think all it takes is pinning a white gardenia behind one ear.
Sandra Reaves-Phillips, for example, in her 1980s one-woman revue The Late, Great Ladies of Jazz and
Blues, subjected Holiday, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, and Dinah Washington to the same crude, Big Mama,
meat-shakin'-on-the-bone, Broadway caricature—as if being victims of systemic racism and abusive,
parasitic men rendered all of them one.
For what it's worth, Bridgewater sports a gardenia in her stylized cover photo. But her shaved head makes
the effect somewhat ironic, and her un-Ladylike exhortations to drummer Lewis Nash on "Miss Brown to You"
and bassist Christian McBride on "Mother's Son-in-Law" notwithstanding, she's too smart and too committed
to a jazz aesthetic to make the same mistake as Reaves-Phillips. Even so, she and Holiday are just too
unlikely a match.
Coming of age during the Great Depression, Holiday made do with table scraps in terms of conventional
vocal technique. Her artistry depended on phrasing—on slight shifts in inflection that not only lent
deeper meaning to even the most sentimental or trivial lyric (often by tacitly mocking it), but that also
yielded harmonic enrichments and rhythmic displacements as surprising as those of Louis Armstrong or
Lester Young. She became a public emblem of self-indulgence for her personal life—especially following the
publication of a tawdry, ghosted autobiography in 1956—but her singing was never self-indulgent.
Self-pitying, maybe, toward the bitter end. But blessedly, she lacked the equipment for vocal
self-indulgence.
At her best, lavishing big feelings on superior ballads like "Good Morning, Heartache" and "You've
Changed" (both of which benefit from James Carter's atmospheric scene-setting on bass clarinet and tenor
saxophone, respectively), Bridgewater has technique to spare on Eleanora Fagan, including a Sarah
Vaughan–like tessitura she can't stop herself from showing off. Unlike Holiday, who lingered behind the
beat with no desire to ruin the suspense by catching up, Bridgewater has seemingly never been confronted
with an uptempo pace she couldn't outrun.
This is who she is, and it can be great fun. One of her trademarks is fragmenting an entire line or two of
a lyric into a rapid-fire, evenly accented staccato, and when she gets going on pianist Edsel Gomez's
tricky, polyrhythmic arrangement of "Lady Sings the Blues" to open the album, her momentum pulls you right
along—a Holiday plaint is successfully transformed into a sassy celebration. But Bridgewater uses this
device far too often as the album progresses, and some of her attempts to put her own stamp on Holiday's
material come off as perverse. When she changes "Lover Man" from a naked, erotic plea into a flirty
nursery rhyme, it's as if she's taken the wrong message from Glenn Coulter's famous observation that "next
to Billie, others singing of love sound like little girls playing house."
Eleanora Fagan goes completely off the rails only at the very end, with an anguished and—dare I say
it?—overdramatized reading of "Strange Fruit" that owes more to Nina Simone than Holiday ("an actress
without an act," in the words of Martin Williams, as long as I'm quoting other writers), who trusted Abel
Meeropol's graphic imagery of a Southern lynching to speak for itself—as if watching events unfold with an
audience spellbound by her every word, too shocked to register outrage until the end. (At least
Bridgewater doesn't follow it with "Willow, Weep for Me," as Nnenna Freelon did on her 2005 Holiday
tribute album.) Here we have what might be the most telling difference between Holiday and Bridgewater. In
her final years, Holiday could be openly contemptuous toward audiences she sensed were there strictly for
the schadenfreude. But even on her carefree early recordings, she sounds completely within herself,
indifferent to anyone but her fellow musicians. Bridgewater, conversely, is a born crowd-pleaser, and just
how theatrical she is became fully apparent to me once I heard Eleanora Fagan over speakers instead of
headphones—she requires a stage larger than my hat size. Whereas Holiday, though keeping her distance,
always seems to be emanating from within your head, leaving enough to the imagination to be a figment of
it.
"This album is my way of paying my respect to a vocalist who made it possible for singers like me to
carve out a career for ourselves," says Bridgewater, who performed the role of Holiday in the triumphant
theatrical production, Lady Day--based on the singer's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues--staged in
Paris and London in 1986 and 1987. "I wanted Eleanora Fagan to be something different: more modern and a
celebration, not a [recording] that goes dark and sullen and maudlin. I wanted the album to be joyful."
Product Description
Over the course of a multifaceted career that has spanned four decades, Dee Dee Bridgewater has risen to
the top tier of today's jazz vocalists, putting her own unique spin on standards as well as taking
intrepid leaps of faith in re-envisioning jazz classics. For her latest recording, Eleanora Fagan
(1915-1959): To Billie With Love From Dee Dee, Bridgewater honors an iconic jazz figure, Billie Holiday,
who died tragically at the age of 44 a half-century ago. Ms. Bridgewater states that Eleanora Fagan goes
far deeper than being a tribute album of retreaded Holiday tunes. "Billie deserves to have her music heard
in another light," she says, "and I definitely didn't set out to imitate her." Key to the fresh approach
is pianist Edsel Gomez, Bridgewater's longtime band mate who wrote new arrangements for the 12 songs on
the album, including the African polyrhythmic-charged interpretation of "Lady Sings the Blues, " a
reharmonized version of "All of Me" and the gospel-tinged "God Bless the Child." Says Bridgewater: "Edsel
is an extremely gifted, talented arranger with very modern ideas. Edsel has the ability to be modern and
work in a tasteful fashion." Gomez took on the daunting challenge of bringing new life to the music with
enthusiasm. "I listened to everything Billie Holiday ever recorded," he says. "I let her music speak to
me." He also kept in mind the personalities of the all-star band Bridgewater had assembled for the
recording: dynamic reeds player James Carter, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Lewis Nash. "This was
my dream band," says Bridgewater. "I got to work with these musicians who I'd been dying to play with. I
thought, I can't miss. With this band I can have a hard-swinging, touching celebration of Billie's music."
Bridgewater sings into the nuances of such songs as "Good Morning Heartache," "Lover Man" and "Fine and
Mellow" with an allure that's equal parts sexy, spunky and sublime. "This was the first time when I wasn't
concerned about having a particular sound of voice," Bridgewater says. "I was just singing from my gut. It
was all so swinging and so soulful." Other highlights include the haunting "You've Changed" with Carter
blowing smoky soul to complement Bridgewater's moving vocals, the spunky "Mother's Son-in-Law" with
McBride dueting with the coquettish singer, and the uptempo "Miss Brown to You" featuring Nash's drumming
prowess. Over the course of her career, Bridgewater has paid homage to monumental figures of the music
world, recording albums dedicated to Ella Fitzgerald (the Grammy Award-winning Dear Ella, 1997), Horace
Silver (Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver, 1995) and Kurt Weill (This Is New, 2002). But with
Eleanora Fagan--the follow-up to 2007's brilliant Red Earth: A Malian Journey that melded the music of
Mali with jazz--Bridgewater delivers one of the most remarkable recording performances of her career. "Dee
Dee is a spirited dynamo and a soulful balladeer," says liner note writer Dan Ouellette. "She sings with a
razor-edged voice; she scats with abandon; she makes you cry. She even chokes up herself upon descending
into the ghoulish drama of `Strange Fruit,' which serves as the album's poignant finale. She gives a
moving read with a sparse arrangement supporting her." Instead of playing it safe and recreating her
performance in Lady Day, on Eleanora Fagan, Bridgewater reacquaints herself with Holiday, shining a new
ray of love on the often-misunderstood jazz icon. "I wanted the record to be a collection that would not
be like the music of the show," she says. That philosophy is in keeping with Bridgewater's approach to all
of her projects: "I want to move forward, just as I've done with each of my albums. To not go backwards,
but progress. Constantly."
