Collection: Dee Dee Bridgewater

Dee Dee Bridgewater grew up in Flint, Michigan, the daughter of Matthew Garrett, a jazz trumpeter and high school music teacher, and spent her college years singing with big bands at Michigan State and the University of Illinois before moving to New York with her husband, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, in 1970. Cecil got there first, landing steady work with Horace Silver and then the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Orchestra at the Village Vanguard. When Jones heard Dee Dee sing, she joined the band as featured vocalist, staying from 1972 to 1974 and working alongside Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach and Rahsaan Roland Kirk in the sessions that came alongside that gig. Jones later said of her, "Thad Jones was my world. Everything I know about music, I learned from Thad Jones." In 1974, the same year she made her debut album in Tokyo for Trio Records, she auditioned for "The Wiz" on Broadway and won the role of Glinda the Good Witch, winning the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical the following year. That Broadway success, and the soul and pop records she made through the late 1970s, kept "Afro Blue" out of her story for four decades. She moved to Paris in the mid-1980s, starred in a Billy Holiday tribute, and eventually resumed a jazz recording career with Verve in the early 1990s that produced the Grammy-winning "Dear Ella" (1997) and "Eleanora Fagan (1917-1959): To Billie with Love from Dee Dee" (2010). She has been named an NEA Jazz Master and is still active.