ROCKWIRED INTERVIEWS DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER

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	ROCKWIRED INTERVIEWS DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER FROM A SPIRITUAL PLACE DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER RETURNS TO ROCKWIRED WITH HER NEW CD 'RED EARTH - A MALIAN JOURNEY' AND A RENEWED SENSE OF SELF INTERVIEWED BY BRIAN LUSH It has been two years since DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER has released a CD (The GRAMMY nominated J'AI DEUX AMOURS, 2005). The time in between has been spent travelling the world doing live performances here and there, and working tirelessly with the FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL ORGANIZATION. Aside from working on her latest CD RED EARTH - A MALIAN JOURNEY with acclaimed Malian producer CHEICK TIDIANE SECK , Ms. BRIDGEWATER has been on a mission of self-discovery. This mission has lead her all the way to the country of Mali; a country she now thinks of as home. "It was very interesting." says BRIDGEWATER of setting foot on the soils of Mali. "The whole experience touched another depth of spiritiuality that I had longed for and since I've been, I feel complete. I feel at peace. It answered so many 'why's' - why I behave the way I do and think and act. My values are Malian values." RED EARTH - A MALIAN JOURNEY can be thought of as the soundtrack to this discovery of self. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was the music that lead BRIDGEWATER in this bold new direction. "I was trying to find my ancestry; my African heritage and as I couldn't trace my family back on both of my parents sides, I decided that I would listen to music and let the music speak to me. I focused on West Africa and listened to music from just about every country in West Africa. Everytime I would listen to music from Mali, whether it be a musician or a singer, it just stirred something in me and it was very, very, strange. It was also very very strong." ROCKWIRED once again, had the privilege of speaking with this exceptional artist. Here is how it went. Why the title RED EARTH? Because I've always been fascinated with RED EARTH. I've always been drawn to red earth everytime I've seen it. I want to touch, walk in it, and get it on me. I guess it stems from when I was a baby. I don't know. When I went to Mali, not only did I feel at home among the people, it was the red earth. There it was and it feels right in my gut, very strongly. Everytime I go to Mali, they think I'm Malian and they speak to me in Bambara and I answer in French and tell them I'm American. Even the Malian president has told me that I am a descendant of the Peul tribe - a northern, wandering tribe in Mali. A nomadic tribe. So, that's why RED EARTH. This CD sounds like a love letter to Mali in the same way that J'AI DEUX AMOURS was a love letter to France. Hmmm. I never thought of it that way but it could be. You've assembled a number of musicians on this album. I didn't assemble the musicians on this album. I cannot take the credit for that. That was done by a gentlemen named CHEICK TIDIANE SECK. He is from Mali and very well respected. He is a very rounded musician as well. He plays piano, keyboards,organ and all of the traditional Malian instruments. He's the person that provides work for a lot of other Malian musicians and is responsible for launching the careers of a lot of Malian artists as well. So, he did that. I would'nt have known where to start because I don't know Malian music enough to know who would be the musicians to work on this particular project. How did you get in touch with him? I knew about him because he produced that beautiful album of HANK JONES' called SARALA in 1995 and so when I decided that this was too big of an undertaking for me, and that I didn't know enough about who was who and what was what, that I knew I needed someone in charge of that. So we met in late October of 2003 and planned our trip for August of 2004 and I decided that I wanted to work with him and he seemed really knowledgeable. He was like my guide; my musical guide, my spiritual guide. He's also quite an historian on the history of Mali. He's just fascinating and extremely talented. What drew you to Mali? It came from this personal search that I decided to make. I was trying ot find my ancestry; my African heritage and as I couldn't trace my family back on both of my parents sides, I decided that I would listen to music and let the music speak to me. I focused on West Africa and listened to music from just about every country in West Africa. Everytime I would listen to music from Mali, whether it be a musician or a singer, it just stirred something in me and it was very, very, strange. It was also very very strong - this music. Finally, after this re-occuring so much I was like "all right, I give up! Something's going on. I've gotta go to Mali." There had to be a reason why I felt so attached to this music. That's how it happened. After the first visit, I knew right away that it was Mali. I've been to Senegal through the FAO (FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL ORGANIZATION) and I didn't feel like I belonged to those people. You set foot on Mali and it all made sense? Yes. If you go through the booklet, I even look like RAMATA DIAKITE who did MAMA (from RED EARTH). She's from a northern Malian tribe. We look like sisters. And TATA 'BAMBO' KOUYATE who wrote BAMBO looks like my mother's sister. It was very interesting. The whole experience touched another depth of spiritiuality that I had longed for and since I've been touched by it, I feel complete. I feel at peace. It answered so many 'why's' - why I behave the way I do and think and act. My values are Malian values. All of my African artwork, all of it comes from Mali and I had no idea. Another thing that's happened to me recently - I have Chinese blood from my father's side. A man came to work on some windows in my house - the man was from China - and he looked around at al of my Asian artwork and he said "all your artwork is from China!" He asked if I knew it, and I told him no. So maybe there is something to this stuff. Maybe you do experience something of the outside world when you're in the womb. It happened with ELLA. Really? Yes. When I was working on the DEAR ELLA project, I decided that I wanted to work on some songs from the early part of her career. I was listening to a box set of her earlier years and before I would listen to the song, I was reading titles and some of the songs would start playing and I was like 'How the hell do I know this song?' I looked at the title and I didn't know what it was, yet I was humming along to these songs. By the fourth song, I called my mom and I told her 'When you were pregnant with me, you were listening to ELLA, right?" She said yes, so I put on a song for her to listen to and she started humming along and singing to it. I said to her 'Mama, I recognize these songs'. I didn't know the lyrics but I knew the melody. ELLA was all my mother listened to because it made her feel so happy. The first track on this CD is AFRO BLUE. Wasn't that the title of your first album? It was the name of my first album but do you know that when I started doing the project, that it never entered my mind? So there was no contrivance. It just felt right. I had this great arrangement worked out for it in quintet formation which is piano, bass, drums, vocals and percussion. Everytime we would do that song with that arrangement, people would just go crazy so I figured that I wanted to open with that because the way it was arranged lent itself to being a percussion piece. In the lyrics, I wanted to pay tribute to OSCAR BROWN JR. He died not to long ago and I think he was one of our most prolific black lyricists. He and JOHN HENDRICKS. Didn't even think about it but I was so far gone into this discovery as a result of my visits to Mali. Did you see all of the musicians that were on this album? It was like a parade of musicians everyday. I got caught up in watching CHEICK lead these musicians. I don't have any of CHEICK TIDIANE SECK's arrangements on paper. He would play what he wanted people to play and then they would play it and make little modifications on the theme, and then we'd record it. That was how we did it. Have you ever worked that way before? No. Nothing on paper. On J'AI DEUX AMOURS we worked out the arrangements like that kinda, sorta. We would talk about the song, and someone would make a suggestion and then we'd put it all together and refine it some more. With RED EARTH it was one person dictating all of this stuff and I put my complete trust in him based on this one album he had done with HANK JONES. I'm very spiritual in that way. I feel that if I leave myself open, I will be drawn to the right people. I believe in the power of prayer even though my faith waivered after reading THE DA VINCI CODE and ANGELS AND DEMONS. How so? The whole thing about the Holy Grail and the fact that Jesus was human and the Catholic Church had created this whole myth and how Jesus' family exists today and is protected by this secretive society. But it's a work of fiction, DEE DEE. A work of fiction based on some factual information and that's why the Catholic Church was so upset. They're easy to upset. It seems so these days. Aren't they sensitive? My years as a Catholic were good. They were Okay, but then I became a teenager and I started hearing these doctrines that I was supposed to accept and I would say "why?'. How is it that the Catholic Church is the only real religion? How can you say that when there are so many different cultures and beliefs around the world? When I started saying that kind of stuff they didn't know what to do. I was thrown off of the debate team because of this and up came the Mother Superior yanking on my uniform, my pleated skirt and down from the stage I came with books in hand and marched down the center aisle and out of the school and told to never return. That was how I left Catholic School. I guess I wasn't brave enough to make a scene in Catholic School. I wish I knew how to get expelled. I can't keep quiet. That's my problem. You can't. And good for you. Uh, I don't know! (laughs) It's kept me on the fringe a bit, so I don't know. I don't like B.S. Save us time, please! and money and everything. That's what I try to tell my son. If you did it, you've got to be man enough to get up and stand for it. You can't cop a plea after you've done something. Before I called you, I just read that MAX ROACH passed away. Yes. I read that a couple of hours before I called you, I didn't even know if you were going to be up for this interview. Well, you know, I knew that MAX was very ill and I haven't seen MAX in several years. I knew and I also knew that he was ill for a long time so I felt relief. I've had so much death in my family and people close to me that have gone that I'm begining to have another point of view about what death is. For me, as I get older and have begun to feel at peace with myself, I see how it can be a release - a separation from the physical world and I believe that there is this other thing after. I've seen the light and have been told that it wasn't my time to go. Really? I had an experience when I had found out that BETTY CARTER had died. I talked to her two days before she had died and she made me promise that I would not do a tribute to her and that she was waiting for my call because I used to be her little puppydog when I first arrived in New York and a lot of the way I am has come from my associaition with BETTY CARTER. I would say that BETTY CARTER is by far the singer that had the most impact on me, including ELLA. At any rate, the day that she died, I didn't know it. I had an afternoon show at a festival in Oakland with KOOL AND THE GANG as a headliner and all of these groups are like either smooth jazz or R&B and there I was doing the ELLA FITZGERALD tribute in 1998 and I've got this acoustic trio and I've got this predominantly black audience. We started playing ELLA and people started getting up droves so I said 'Okay, let's do some HORACE SILVER, cause there's some funky stuff in HORACE. So we were doing the second tune of HORACE and at the end of it my feet felt like cement and couldn't pick my feet up. At the end of the song, I went over to the stage manager and asked him if I could cut the show short and he said "Did you get your check." I said 'yes I did' and he said "You would certainly be doing us a favor." With that said I was going to go back onstage and announce to everyone that we were leaving, and as I was walking down the stairs, a woman from the audience came up to me and said, "You must be devastated honey with the news about BETTY." I said "What news about BETTY?" The woman told me that BETTY died and I fainted. When I came to, people were standing over me wondering why I fainted, and I wake up hearing people saying that I "..was a junkie." and that I was "..a crackhead" and there was someone else going "no, no, no, I know somebody she knows and she ain't into none of that". They were having this big discussion over me as I was coming to and I was shouting for my sound engineer who was my best friend who just died last year, and that was very hard for me. He was my rock. Any way, he comes running towards, this tall, skinny, white boy, Italian, with rings on every finger and this deep gravelly voice who picks me up to my trailer lays me down. The paramedics arrive, and they take my blood pressure and all of a sudden I felt cold and I couldn't feel my legs. My sound engineer told me to calm down and relax and I just started to tell myslef, "I can't do this. I can't do this." Everything started to go black and then I saw this white dot at the end of this black tunnel. I'm engulfed in this blackness and this white dot is coming towards me. It was half way towards me and I hear the voice of my sound engineer telling me 'DEE DEE, it's not your time to die...Wake up...Wake up.' And I woke up. It was a very unsettling experience. When I feel something, I really do feel something. And it shows in the music. I think so. Especially on this album. This album is special. The song BAMBO (NO MORE) is a standout track. Would you like to talk about it? That song was written by TATA KUOYATE whom I spoke of earlier and she wrote it in the early sixties and it's talking about all of the conditions that women have to live in and being forced to marry and maintain a certain type of existence - second class citizenship, and servitutde. She was saying in this song that 'This Must Stop!' The song became a huge hit and it was so popular that the government was forced to abolish forced marriage. The song became an anthem all around the country. That's pretty big. I don't do that song in live performance because I have not found a singer that I felt was strong enough to do it and give it the same intensity that TATA has when she sings it. Even though she is older and it was during Ramadan when we did the recording. The song is so powerful that I can only feel it when it comes from her mouth. Initially, I wasn't going to put it on the album. I was going to make it a bonus track and then CHEICK told me that he had to put on the album because it was important to Mali. And that's how it ended up on the album. What I find fascinating about you as an artist is you ability to change completely from one album to the next. Not alot of artist do that. Well, it's not done a lot vocally in jazz. My role models and my heroes were all musicians for the most part. I wanted to be the kind of artist that would be thought of along the lines of a MILES DAVIS. MILES did that. He would change and come out with something completely away from what his previous recording was. There is something very appealing to me about changing constantly. If you are changing and constantly searching for something new, then it's going to broaden your scope musically and on all levels as a human being. If I stayed in the same stuff, I would go crazy. That's safe. I don't wanna be safe in my artistry. Do you feel that it is an unwritten rule that vocalists have to play it safe? I think it is. I've had that told to me by journalists in France. Who did I think I was changing with every album. I had one journalist tell me that I'm a singer not a musician. And I said 'Excuse me! I'm a musician, not a singer!' So, there are people that think that way about singer. Have there been live performances for RED EARTH yet? I just finished a two month tour in Europe and I did a big tour in March and April and then I did a few dates in May and then I started my Summer Tour on June 26 and a show on August 4th. Now on Tuesday I go to Southeast Asian for a brief tour. Then (whispers) I'm going on vacation for a week. Is the touring ever rough on family? Yeah it is. Of course it is. I'm gone alot. My husband has basically raised our son who is fifteen now. I'd say for the last ten years, its been a juggling act. Also, I don't know my son. Now what I'm doing is taking a few days off and taking him away for two days, just him and me. He just finished doing the entire Summer tour with us. I made him play guitar because he played on one song on the album. He played on the song CHILDREN GO ROUND. In what I've read, you say you feel like you have nothing to prove. Does that make it harder or easier to be an artist? I think it makes it easier. I don't feel that I have to do things to prove anything. I think I've proved myself as an artist. I have established my voice as an artist. I think now, I can really be about doing the things that I personally want to do. This album , Idid not do out of any kind of a commercial place. I did it from a spiritual place. I had no clue how it was going to turn out because these were uncharted waters. I was lost in this whole thing and it was the most incredible experience. As an artist and as a human being, it has changed my life. I want to dig deeper into this new thing.