Dee Dee Bridgewater - Afro Blue (Mr Bongo Vinyl LP)

Dee Dee Bridgewater - Afro Blue | Vinyl LP - Mr Bongo Reissue (MRBLP216, replica Trio Records sleeve)

• Dee Dee Bridgewater's debut, made in Tokyo at 23 and released only in Japan, recorded across four days at AOI Studios in March 1974 for Trio Records, with her husband Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet, his brother Ron on tenor, Roland Hanna on piano, George Mraz on bass and Motohiko Hino on drums.
• Seven readings that run from Mongo Santamaría and Bobby Hutcherson to Bacharach and the Stylistics, opening with an eight-minute "Afro Blue" that begins in percussion and wordless vocal before the band arrives, and closing with "People Make The World Go Round."
• Official Mr Bongo reissue licensed through Ultra-Vybe, presented in a replica of the original 1974 Trio sleeve and labels with a reproduction of the Japanese insert, which carries liner notes on one side and English lyrics on the other.

Bridgewater was already the lead vocalist in the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Orchestra when Trio brought her to Tokyo. She had joined that band in 1971, when she was 21, and had spent the following years working alongside Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Nobody in America had given her a solo record. A Japanese label did, and the result went unreleased outside Japan for four and a half decades. The band she took into AOI Studios was mostly family. Cecil Bridgewater, her husband, played trumpet and kalimba and wrote five of the seven arrangements. His brother Ron played tenor and handled most of the percussion colour, the cowbell and African castanets and vibraslap that give the title track its opening. Roland Hanna and George Mraz filled the piano and bass chairs, and Motohiko Hino, one of the finest drummers in Japanese jazz, completed the group. The credits list the Bridgewater Jazz Family as supervisors, which tells you something about how the sessions were run.

The material is where the album's reputation comes from. "Afro Blue" takes eight minutes and does not hurry, Bridgewater using her voice as an instrument through the long opening before the tune proper arrives. "Love Vibrations" is a Horace Silver composition, arranged by Silver himself, and Cecil Bridgewater had played in Silver's band, which explains how it got here. The blues medley on side A stretches past eight minutes. Side B opens with "Little B's Poem," Bobby Hutcherson's ballad, taken at just over three minutes and stripped to almost nothing. Then Bacharach and David's "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," which should not work in this company and does, followed by "Love From The Sun" and Thom Bell and Linda Creed's "People Make The World Go Round," the Stylistics song that has become a standard for jazz singers. Bridgewater won a Tony the following year for The Wiz and spent the late 1970s making soul and disco records, which is why this album sat outside her story for so long.