The piquant pairing of Grammy-winning vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater and master pianist Bill Charlap at the Wharton Center’s Pasant Theatre on Friday (Oct. 4) is not your average jazz cruise. It’s a convergence of two remarkable lives in music and a master class in spontaneous collaboration, if not combustion.
“It’s hard to describe what happens between us,” Bridgewater said.
She’s a consummate singer, a Tony-winning Broadway actress and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master; he’s among the most sensitive, brilliant and listenable pianists in jazz. They started working together on and off in 2019, surprising themselves with fresh musical discoveries and bringing mesmerized listeners back again and again.
The minute you peg Bridgewater as the extroverted, flamboyant member of the duo and Charlap as the professorial musical encyclopedia, they flip roles, like a quantum salt and pepper set.
“We’ve developed this amazing chemistry,” Bridgewater said. “Sometimes we’ll be improvising together, and he’ll say, ‘Get out of my head.’ It’s just a wonderful give and take, a wonderful musical conversation. We never know where we’re going to go.”
The God voice
Maybe Bridgewater is bored with the usual we-met-at-a-party stories. Or maybe she really hears voices in her head. Whatever the case, this is her version of the story.
“What actually happened is I woke up one morning, and sometimes I hear a voice,” she said. “I call it my God voice. This voice said, ‘Bill Charlap,’ and I said, ‘What?’ and it said, ‘Bill Charlap.’”
Charlap was unfazed by the notion that a “God voice” had uttered his name in a dawn revelation.
“I believe her,” he said. “Something was in the air that she must have known I would be a partner with her in a way that was unique.”
But why him? Had she heard Charlap play in his sparkling, sophisticated trio with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington? Had she admired Charlap’s sublime duet album of Jerome Kern songs with vocal legend Tony Bennett?
“I don’t know,” Bridgewater said. “I wouldn’t ordinarily have sought him out, but when I hear my God voice, I follow it.”
Scoff at your own risk. That God voice has an impressive track record. Bridgewater has made many unexpected but wildly successful moves over the course of a long and varied career.
Bridgewater was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Flint. She attended Michigan State University for a year but doesn’t remember much about it.
“I partied the entire year,” she said. “I was 18. It was my first year away from home, and I really didn’t want to go to college.”
She wanted to take a year off, but her mother wouldn’t have it.
“I don’t even know why I picked MSU,” Bridgewater said. “I can’t even remember my dorm. But I had a ball.”
After transferring to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she met the formidable jazz trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater. They married and moved to New York City, where Dee Dee launched a multi-faceted career in music and theater.
Things really moved into high gear when she became the lead vocalist of one of the greatest big bands in history, led by trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Mel Lewis.
It was a serious, take-no-prisoners band and a perfect showcase for Bridgewater’s vocal range, high musicianship and crowd-pleasing personality. Before long, she was singing with the greatest of the great: Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dizzy Gillespie and many others.
Describing her many talents is a tough job, even for a thoughtful and articulate musician like Charlap.
“She’s so many different things,” Charlap said. “First of all, she’s a magnificent singer —the voice, the control, the pitch, the shadings, the nuance, the expressionism, all of it. But she’s also a great storyteller and a great actor.”
Her acting talents blossomed in the 1970s, when she won a Tony Award for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in the Broadway debut of “The Wiz.” In 1984, she toured France in the musical “Sophisticated Ladies” and played Billie Holiday in “Lady Day,” earning a nomination for a Laurence Olivier Award.
Jazz was entering a rocky phase, but Bridgewater’s skill and energy served her well as she made fearless forays into R&B, soul, pop and disco. In August, she mined that vein again at the We Out Here festival in Dorset, England, rubbing shoulders with the likes of rapper André 3000 and neo-soul groover Sampha.
“That was all of my old disco and dance music, and that was a lot of fun — and a big hit,” she said. She plans a tour with her dance band soon.
In the 1990s, Bridgewater scored big with a series of albums dedicated to artists she deeply admires, beginning in 1996 with “Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver” in collaboration with the great hard bop pianist himself. Bridgewater’s tribute album to Ella Fitzgerald, “Dear Ella,” won the 1998 Grammy for best vocal jazz album. Her tribute to Billie Holiday earned the same Grammy nod in 2011.
Since then, she has jumped into a wide range of projects, including an Afro-centric collaboration with musicians from Mali, a disc of songs by Kurt Weill and a soul cooker of a CD, “Memphis … Yes, I’m Ready,” in 2017.
A common thread runs through these myriad projects, all the way to her duo with Charlap. It’s not just the God voice. Bridgewater loves to reveal and demonstrate human possibilities to their fullest, whether they’re new, familiar or rediscovered.
Looking at today’s artists, she sees modern jazz “moving more into personalized spaces.”
“I thought it would be good to remind people of the origins of the music, the improvisation,” she said. “Because people don’t improvise so much anymore, and there’s certainly not very much scatting going on.”
She knew Charlap was a master improviser steeped in the Great American Songbook, what she calls “classical jazz.”
In 2019, she called her booking agent, Jack Randall, and said, “Jack, I think I’m supposed to work with Bill Charlap.”
“That’s funny,” Randall shot back. “I work with him, too.” That God voice knew what it was about.
“The words drip off the note”
A mutual agent made it easy to connect Bridgewater with Charlap, but paring their music down to a duet — and trusting each other to make it work on stage — was a big leap for both of them.
“Our styles are so different,” Bridgewater said. “I didn’t know what it was going to be.”
They put together a setlist, drawn mostly from the jazz standards, show tunes and popular songs of the 20th century and anchored by their mutual love of Duke Ellington.
“The first few concerts, I really felt uncomfortable,” Bridgewater said. “I felt completely naked. I told the audience I felt exposed, and a couple of times I jokingly hid behind the piano.”
But it didn’t take long for them to realize they had stumbled onto something special.
“She was taking a big risk to trust me that much,” Charlap said. “That was a chemistry neither one of us could have expected, and it caught fire from the very first note.”
The pandemic put a pause on their collaboration in 2020 and much of 2021. By 2022, they were back with a vengeance, playing 20 to 30 gigs a year together.
A recording of the duo is finally due to come out next spring.
“We’re so in tune with each other, we have complete and utter confidence in one another,” Bridgewater said. “I feel like with Bill, I can go off the edge of the cliff and he’s going to catch me, and I know he feels the same way.”
Charlap rarely gets to open his mouth on stage, but he’s one of the rare pianists who knows the lyrics of every song he plays.
“To me, the words drip off the note,” he said. “It’s such an important part of the song.”
“It’s crazy,” Bridgewater said. “Sometimes there have been instances where I tell him I forgot the lyric, and he’ll say, ‘It’s OK, I got you’ and feed me the lyric.”
In spite of his boundless musical knowledge and formidable piano chops, Charlap exudes an atmosphere of pine-fresh oxygen, a generous zone of breathing room for the listener, in a way few great pianists do. Listening to Charlap, you can hear yourself think.
Needless to say, that breathing room is conducive to duet work. But Charlap is wary of the implication that he’s laid back or — God forbid — complacent.
“You could hear me on any given night where perhaps it would be more verbose, maybe more of a tidal wave,” he cautioned.
Like Bridgewater, he bristles at limitations. Their duet performances toggle with quantum quickness from heartbreak to joy, from recital hall gravity to music hall playfulness.
That’s the way music should be, in Charlap’s view.
“It should always be everything, and it is,” he said. “Just think of something early in jazz — a rag by Scott Joplin. Is that music that’s rejoicing? That’s crying? I think it’s both. Is it sacred? Is it secular? I think it’s both. All of that is happening at the same time.”
Infinite jukebox
Charlap grew up listening to artists who embodied the ideal of music as an “everything” bagel — ups and downs, comedy and tragedy, darkness and light. Later in life, he got to play with many of them, most notably the late Tony Bennett.
“He was a great friend and, of course, a giant of an American musician who amalgamated so many things, from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby to Fred Astaire to Jimmy Durante to Judy Garland to Billie Holiday,” Charlap said. “All of those people are in his music.”
Bennett was also a painter. Charlap sees a logical connection between the two arts.
“When I listen, and when I’m working with a singer, I’m listening to the brush strokes that they’re using, the spaces, the rhythm,” he said. “It’s a conversation.”
The conversation carries an extra charge of empathy when Charlap plays duets with his wife, composer and pianist Renee Rosnes, despite the potential for butting heads on two pianos at once.
“We listen to each other,” he said. “Sometimes one instigates and the other follows, and sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes both are instigating or both or following. It can change in a second.”
There’s an infinite jukebox inside Charlap’s brain, and it whirs to life on a whim.
At an early September gig at the Village Vanguard in New York City, Charlap’s trio bounced into the 1923 hit “Sometimes I’m Happy,” recorded by many great artists, including jazz legend Sarah Vaughan.
“The lyrics go, ‘Sometimes I love you, sometimes I hate you, but when I hate you, it’s because I love you.’ That kind of stuff,” he said.
The word “hate” flipped a tiny switch in his mind. Faster than any jukebox could ever cue up a disc, Charlap deftly dropped a snippet from a Benny Goodman tune, “Don’t Be That Way.”
“It just slipped in,” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.” He sang the line out of sheer delight, revealing a warm, gravelly tenor voice: “Oh honey, please don’t be that way.”
“It becomes subliminal,” he said.
Charlap likes everything, from Bach and Debussy to Prince, Jimi Hendrix and Yes. Recent pulls from his LP collection, yet to be put away, include early recordings by Miles Davis, Alban Berg’s violin concerto with Pierre Boulez conducting, a Dixieland disc by Jack Teagarden and his Swingin’ Gates, and a Broadway recording of Mary Martin singing “Peter Pan.”
Whoa — “Peter Pan?”
“My father wrote it,” Charlap explained.
His father, Moose Charlap, was a Broadway composer. His mother, Sandy Stewart, is a cabaret and jazz singer.
“I won’t grow up,” Charlap declared. Was he quoting the most famous song from the Broadway show or making a personal statement? Probably both.
When Charlap was young, famous guests routinely circulated in and out of the house. He was so tight with Edgar “Yip” Harburg, lyricist for “The Wizard of Oz,” that he called him “Uncle Yip.”
Needless to say, the man who gave the world “If I Only Had a Brain,” “The Lollipop Guild” and “Over the Rainbow” was fun to be around.
“He was like another child,” Charlap said. “He made me feel very accepted and seen. I didn’t realize it was Yip Harburg, the genius. It was just Yip.”
Charlap remembers hanging with composer and lyricist Charles Strouse and asking him to play the “All in the Family” theme over and over again. Strouse wrote the theme, along with the music for Broadway blockbusters “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Applause” and “Annie.”
It’s no wonder Charlap’s respect for song lyrics runs so deep. His profound reading of the bittersweet ballad “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” from the 1969 film “The Happy Ending” is a killer example.
Charlap’s touch has all the tenderness, delicacy and solemnity of a marriage proposal, viewed from the heartbreaking horizon of “death do you part.” If you didn’t know the song at all, you’d still guess what it was about.
Unsurprisingly, the lyricists, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, are two of Charlap’s best friends. (Michel Legrand wrote the music.)
“Marilyn is gone now, but Alan is still with us,” he said. “I’ve known them since I was a very young child.”
He recalls being mesmerized by their lyrics to “The Windmills of Your Mind” from the 1968 film “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
“Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel,” he recited with awe. “I didn’t realize how special it all was.”
Although the piano became his voice, he always savored the work of vocalists, from Armstrong and Bennett to Holiday and Garland — “all of the great ones.”
He added Bridgewater to the list.
“She’s just electric,” he said. “The storyteller, the actor, the musician, the singer, the improviser and the risk taker — they’re all there.”
Bridgewater happily volleyed the ball back.
“It’s turned into a beautiful relationship,” she said. “It’s quite unusual to have someone like Bill Charlap. He’s unique. He’s a unicorn.”
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