Dee Dee Bridgewater explores the Billie Holiday songbook with The Brussels Jazz Orchestra

Dee Dee Bridgewater has been threatening to tour during the last two years, and after several postponements, it’s finally happened. The Memphis singer now lives down in New Orleans, for the last six years, and has an urge to hook up with European big bands. Here at Bozar, one of the two major arts centres in Brussels (the other being Flagey), she’s fronting the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, who possess a similar vibration to our own BBC Big Band. Not likely to present a new Anthony Braxton work, but versatile nevertheless.

The show was set in Bozar’s main concert hall, which looked to be very nearly sold out, the atmosphere reeking of perfume by the bucketful. The BJO, a slickly coasting smooth machine, opened with ‘Sky High’, Bridgewater gliding on for ‘Oh, Lady, Be Good!’, as arranged by her trumpeter husband Cecil. She sang and talked between the songs in a highly theatrical manner, setting out to deliver most of the set in an exaggerated French accent. This trait might have remained humorous for one or two numbers, but Bridgewater maintained it with few respites. The audience were laughing, but were they with her, or just being polite?

Bridgewater adopted a seductive banter, laced with innuendo, and interpreted the songs with a brash, knowing wink, narrating their stories. The BJO would benefit from sharper contrasts, at times, between volume and quiet, density and space, with a few more, and longer, solos. A stretch of bluesiness ensued, as Bridgewater softly negotiated ‘Good Morning Heartache’, slow and slinky. ‘Fine And Mellow’ followed, as a draggin’ blues, confirming that Billie Holiday was going to provide the prime focus for this evening. Bart Defoort took a saxophone solo, in front of a driving swing punch, and this is where the gig began to take off. 

Again, ‘Lady Sings The Blues’ had more edge, but Bridgewater’s ‘Loverman’ was a touch too glitzy for the Billie canon. In a nod to New Orleans, she picked Harry Connick Jr.’s ‘One Fine Thing’, tackled with a Louis Armstrong-styled vocal drawl, before she scatted like a trumpet, and gurgled like a swamp. Bridgewater composed herself for ‘God Bless The Child’, before hitting her vocalese showcase, Duke Ellington’s ‘Cottontail’. For this show of mixed pleasures, Bridgewater played for almost two hours, which made the set drag quite heavily during some stretches.