Dee Dee Bridgewater

Bob Harrington Lifetime Achievement Award

During her long, richly complex career, three-time Grammy Award recipient Dee Dee Bridgewater has explored an array of musical realms, establishing herself as a sovereign in several of them.

Bridgewater’s commitment to her artistry and career in jazz is fed by her passion for variety and experiment. She has instigated projects paying tribute to musicians and performers from Ella Fitzgerald to hard-bop pianist/composer Horace Silver. She has stretched the boundaries of scat-singing to new lengths, creating sounds that are sometimes ethereal, often brash, and—more frequently than one might expect—hilarious.

Her triumphs in the jazz world have been matched by her successes in a considerably different discipline: musical theatre—on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in the West End. Her most famous theatrical turn was her legit-stage debut: a Tony Award–winning performance in the original cast of Broadway’s The Wiz, in which she created the role or Glinda, Good Witch of the South. Her other theatrical credits include such titles as Sophisticated Ladies and Lady Day.

She was born Denise Eileen Garrett in Memphis, Tennessee—a city full of musical plenitude. Her father was a jazz trumpeter and music teacher. Bridgewater’s first professional singing job was with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band. Her first album, Afro Blue, was released in 1974, the same year she began her stint in The Wiz. She took a detour into pop, funk, and R&B in the 1980s, but afterward moved to Paris, where she refined her jazz sensibility. She flourished for more than a decade in France before returning to the U.S.

Bridgewater has released a score of albums, from Afro Blue to Elemental, her recent, Grammy-nominated album with jazz pianist Bill Charlap. She has produced most of her own albums in recent years. In 1996 she founded DDB Productions and DDB Records (an independent recording label).

Besides her Tony and her Grammys, she’s won many other honors, including the Doris Duke Artist Award, The ASCAP Foundation Champion Award, and an NEA Jazz Masters Award. She was presented with an earlier Bistro Award in 2012, for Ongoing Artistry in Jazz.

Her philanthropic work includes a role fighting world hunger as a Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). She also co-created The Woodshed Network, a support organization for women in jazz.

She is proud mother to two daughters, Tulani Bridgewater (producer on the Elemental album) and China Moses (a singer and TV host),

Dee Dee Bridgewater seems to have no shortage of energy when in performance mode, something for which she is unapologetic. She told Matthew Baal of AllAboutJazz in 2023: “If I’m not going full out and full at it, then what’s the point of me being onstage?”

This commitment to being fully present and engaged, whether onstage or off, seems bound to continue long after her acceptance of this and any other lifetime achievement award.