A fun new album featuring vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater and pianist Bill Charlap, Elemental is for serious jazz fans in the mood for some playful, yet ticklingly sophisticated, voice and piano comingling. Comprising eight familiar jazz standards performed in fascinating, unfamiliar fashions, the collaborative album (with vocal arrangements by Bridgewater and piano arrangements by Charlap) revels in a spare aesthetic—just two “voices,” one human and one pianistic, yet conjuring a vast spectrum of sonic relationships that reward keen and careful listening.
Masterful, Grammy-winning artists, Bridgewater and Charlap perform in equal partnership—not as singer and accompanist. Each contributes independent musical thoughts that establish marvelous, game-like dialogues in which the sassy jazz singer and sly pianist join, respond to, embellish, imitate, re-direct, or challenge one another’s creative statements.
The album opens with an enticing series of rhythmic shushes and clicking sounds, as Bridgewater mimics the play of a percussionist’s brushes and sticks. She then starts to sing and scat and, with Charlap joining in the action, an intriguing arrangement of “I’m Beginning to See the Light” (Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Harry James/Don George) takes shape. It’s loose, roomy, nuanced, and imaginative. And like the rest of the album’s slippery arrangements, it’s slow to arrive at destination points, then quick to depart in different and unpredictable directions.
Bridgewater and Charlap(Photo: Evelyn Freja)
Despite the familiarity of the songs, listeners won’t comfortably “settle into” the performances of these chestnuts, as they are treated with an irreverence that keeps one on guard, and emerges as the album’s most appealing quality. The most entertaining tracks are those that very humorously defy expectations. For instance, in the closer, “Caravan” (Duke Ellington, Juan Tizol/Irving Mills), Charlap puts forth a jarring rhythmic pattern of bass notes that pervades and propels the number. One imagines this “caravan” of desert-crossers traveling atop awkward-stepping camels. Far from the sultry, swaying motion usually captured by the song, here it’s an amusingly bumpy ride.
The album’s cheekiness is even more fun when it plays out within the relationship between the two performers. Singing “In the Still of the Night” (Cole Porter), Bridgewater takes a leisurely tempo, letting her voice wallow in its natural vibrato. Charlap responds to her contemplative vocals with a speedy piano passage that not only displays his extraordinary technique, but steers the arrangement into a careening U-turn. The glittering rapidity of his sounds erases any notion of “stillness” and pulls Bridgewater into a faster pace and a reverberating barrage of scatting syllables. Though she finds her way back to a quiet place for the song’s closing measures, we are left breathless from the journey.
Other album highlights include a notably syncopated version of “Love for Sale” (Cole Porter) that gives a more business-like feel to the melancholy song’s seductive pleas. And “Here’s That Rainy Day” (Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Burke) blends Bridgewater’s mournful singing with Charlap’s insistently light and shiny piano chords, conveying both the sense of isolation and cleansing uplift a gentle rain shower can bring. Yet most emotionally insightful is the duo’s interpretation of “Mood Indigo” (Duke Ellington, Barney Bigard/Irving Mills). With her brilliantly evolving repetition of the words “so lonesome,” Bridgewater reveals how sadness grows into anger, and we understand “blue” as an energized, not passive, state of mind.
Though completely satiating as is, the musically rich recording (released on June 13 via Mack Avenue Records/DDB Records) offers a bonus track, available only on its digital formats. A swinging, carefree rendition of “The More I See You” (Harry Warren/Mack Gordon), it finds the pair functioning largely in sync with one another, less concerned with banter, and happy to explore the pleasures of togetherness.
Lisa Jo Sagolla is the author of "The Girl Who Fell Down: A Biography of Joan McCracken" and "Rock ‘n’ Roll Dances of the 1950s." A choreographer, critic, and historian, she has written for Back Stage, American Theatre, Film Journal International, and numerous other popular publications, encyclopedias, and scholarly journals. An adjunct professor at Columbia University and Rutgers, she is currently researching a book on the influence of Pennsylvania’s Bucks County on America’s musical theatre.
