Dee Dee Bridgewater - To BIllie With Love - A Celebration of Lady Day, Support: The Ronnie Scotts All Stars Monday 19th April - Tuesday 20th April

 Dee Dee Bridgewater was surrounded by jazz from a young age, as her father, Matthew Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher. 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.


In the early 1970s, Bridgewater joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra as the lead vocalist. This 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, she released her first own album, entitled Afro Blue, and she also performed on Broadway in the musical The Wiz.
Bridgewater is a two-time Grammy Award Winner, Tony Award Winner and Host of NPR's Syndicated Radio show "JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater". She is also a United Nations Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Bridgewater has laboured over both standards and pop/soul during her career in jazz, but Red Earth is something wholly new and wholly wonderful—a thorough exploration of her roots born from a trip to Africa and a complex engagement with musicians from Mali. Of this experience, she said, ‘ I instinctively knew it was time…time to find my way home.’