JazzSet

KPBX 91.1 fm, Thursday, 11pm-12midnight

JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater brings you music in performance, sweet and hot, every week. With her fine,
friendly voice, Grammy and Tony Award-winning host Dee Dee Bridgewater introduces sets from locales like Kennedy Center Jazz in Washington and festivals from Monterey to Santa Fe. JazzSet also features music from clubs, campuses, off-the-highway local hangouts, and neighborhood hot spots.

Program Listings
About Dee Dee

Only a handful of entertainers have ever commanded such depth of artistry in every medium. Fewer still have won a Tony, two Grammy.s, and the top musical honor in France -- the Victoire de la Musique --
plus been nominated for London theater's Laurence Oliver Award. Dee Dee captured the hearts of audiences worldwide in The Wiz with her signature song, "If
You Believe." Nick Ashford of Ashford and Simpson said Dee Dee's rendition "personified a generation and gave us all hope."

As a sparkling ambassador for jazz, she bathed in its music before she could walk. Her mother played the greatest albums of Ella Fitzgerald, whose artistry provided an inspiration for Dee Dee throughout her career. Her father was a trumpeter who taught music to Booker Little, Charles Lloyd and George Coleman, among others. It's the kind of background that leaves its mark on an adolescent, especially one who appeared solo and with a trio as soon as she was able.

Dee Dee's other vocation, that of globetrotter, reared its head when she toured the Soviet Union in 1969 with the University of Illinois Big Band. A year later, she followed her then husband, Cecil Bridgewater, to New York.

Dee Dee made her phenomenal New York debut in 1970 as the lead vocalist for the band led by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, one of the premier jazz orchestras of the time. These New York years marked an early career in concerts and on recordings with such giants as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach and Roland Kirk, and rich experiences with Norman Connors, Stanley Clarke and Frank Foster's Loud Minority.

Dee Dee doesn't care much for labels, and in 1974 she jumped at the chance to act and sing on Broadway where her voice, beauty and stage presence won her great success and a Tony Award for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wiz. This began a long line of awards and accolades as well as opportunities to work in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris and in London where she garnered the coveted Laurence Olivier Award nomination as Best Actress for her portrayal of jazz legend Billie Holiday in Stephen Stahl's Lady Day.

Performing the lead in equally demanding acting/singing roles as Sophisticated Ladies, Cosmopolitan Greetings, Black Ballad, Carmen Jazz and the musical Cabaret (as the first black actress to star as Sally Bowles), she secured her reputation as a consummate entertainer.