EyeShotJazz | Jazz Photography

Dee Dee Bridgewater Singing at the Triple Door with her Red Earth Group on Oct 21st 2007

Dee Dee Bridgewater triumphs on stage and on record while her passionate, honey-tongued voice amasses a long list of accomplishments, accolades, and artistic milestones that few living legends can match.
After marrying trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater in the early ‘70s, she soon began singing with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestra, followed by stints with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins, a 1975 Tony Award for her portrayal of the good witch Glinda during a two-year stint in The Wiz on Broadway, and a Laurence Olivier Best Actress Award nomination for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in Lady Day.
Speaking from her home in Henderson, Nevada, Bridgewater breezily discusses music and acting, occasionally pausing to take bites of her dinner. “As a singer and a bandleader,” she says, “I’ve been able to take things that I’ve learned in theater and apply them to my performances: communicating with the public, clowning in between songs, trying to create a repertoire that has a nice flow to it.”
That repertoire expands again with Bridgewater’s stunning new album, Red Earth, A Malian Journey. Folding West-African flavors into a matrix of jazz and blues, the album employs 10 Malian musicians – including Grammy-winning kora player Toumani
Diabaté (kora) – in a sensuous melding of that country’s traditions of musical storytelling and Bridgewater’s own life-long love of blues and jazz.
“I had wanted to do an African project, but I never could define it,” she remembers, “but once I felt very strongly that [my ancestry] was from Mali, then I decided I would focus this whole project on Malian music.”
Born to the descendants of Native Americans, Chinese, and Germans – “I just knew he was white and spoke this funny language,” she laughs, mimicking her grandmother’s memories of the latter’s own grandfather – Bridgewater was subsequently
raised on a diet of regular anecdotes about her ethnically various ancestors. Nevertheless, she eventually found that her most spiritually resonant bloodline ran through Mali.
The physical journey back began with her appointment, in 1999, as an Honorary Ambassador for the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The position called for her help in setting up self-sustaining, women’s business collectives in the villages of several African countries. “In the beginning,” she laughs, “the FAO tried do it with men, but men would squander the funds.”
In Mali, she worked with the Peul tribe, among whom she began to feel an extra-dimensional affinity. “When I was there, there were people who resembled people I know in the States,” she recalls. “It was freaky. And certain customs that we have in black communities, I understand now where they came from, because they’re right there being practiced.”
A return trip yielded the majority of recording for Red Earth. Stylistically, the record ambles through jump blues (“Children Go ‘Round”), jazz balladry (Nina Simone’s “Four Women”), scat-laden pop (“Compared to What”), and incantatory Malian traditionals, each with a story of its own. “No More,” for example, revisits the Malian protest song “Bambo,” the popularity of which, in the 1960s, forced the Malian government to abolish the previously institutionalized practice of forced marriage.
Song by song, the album works tirelessly to maintain the storytelling spirit of the griots. “In the Malian and other African cultures, they’re the oral historians,” Bridgewater explains. “At least that’s what they used to be.
“Today the griots tell stories, basically, to flatter the people they want to get some money out of,” she says with a laugh. “But they are also able to tell you a lot of the history of their country.”
Fortunately, Bridgewater – gifted with talent, accustomed to success, and trained in drama – has a subject of constant fascination for her main character. “Of course, with Red Earth,” she admits coyly, “I’m telling my own real story.”
In elegant service to its protagonist, Red Earth – signaling the reddish soil of both Mali and her native Memphis – spins an undulating yarn. Throughout,
Bridgewater’s original lyrics render Malian tales into first-person English, and remarkably, much of her singing so carefully settles into the Malian rhythms and diphthongs that her English actually sounds like a generally recognizable and yet distinctly African language.
Red Earth’s opener re-imagines the title track of Bridgewater’s debut album, 1974’s Afro Blue. Shortened considerably – but certainly not, er, mollified – the “Afro Blue” of Red Earth testifies to a skyscraping career by recalling its distant beginning. From the ground up, the song’s new moody polyrhythms promise that even 33 years on, there’s undiscovered
country left, not only in Africa, but within Dee Dee Bridgewater herself.

Photograph by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, a photojournalist specializing in photojournalism and portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle wedding photographer with an unobtrusive, story-telling approach creating award winning Seattle wedding photography and wedding photojournalism ranked among the best Seattle wedding photographers.

I photographed Wayne Horvitz during a sound check before his performance at the 2006 Earshot Jazz Festival at the Triple Door. He was laying with the Gravitas Quartet. A beautiful group. What I really like about this photograph is the backlight making almost a complete silhouette. It is really nice to have access to different angles during a soundcheck instead of shooting from the audience. I am going to add this to my editorial website splash page. I like the feeling of it. Maybe it is too quiet?

Photograph by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, a photojournalist specializing in photojournalism and portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle wedding photographer with an unobtrusive, story-telling approach creating award winning Seattle wedding photography and wedding photojournalism ranked among the best Seattle wedding photographers.

Victor Noriega plays with the Paul Rucker Group at The Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center on October, 19th, 2008, during the Earshot Jazz Festival.

Victor played great with Paul Ruckers Group during the Festival. I wanted to get in a photo of him but the Festival schedule was too busy to make before now.

Earshot Jazz described his playing as “Victor Noriega has developed a distinct personal style that is both inventive and adventurous… his piano playing is crisp and articulate, and his compositions fuse Classical and Filipino folk elements with a jazz aesthetic. One moment his playing is reminiscent of the intricate contrapuntal lines in a Bach fugue, and the next the percussive dissonance of Bartok’s music for piano… Listening to Noriega perform is like hearing the pieces of a puzzle come together into a satisfying whole.”

Photograph by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, a photojournalist  specializing in photojournalism and portrait photography for publications and corporations and a Seattle wedding photographer with an unobtrusive, story-telling approach creating award winning Seattle wedding photography and wedding photojournalism ranked among the best Seattle wedding photographers.

Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra West, Wednesday, November 5, King Cat Theater

For a Seattle photographer, this was so much fun to watch and photograph this group play to these old movies. I wish they had a regular gig doing this.

New York-trumpeter Steven Bernstein conducts his fine nine-piece band, which typically explores the largely-lost music of the bluesy, loose-territory bands. Tonight he performed in accompaniment to three Laurel and Hardy silent films on the screen behind him at the King Kat Theatre and he and the band had a lot of fun with it as did the audience. The Laurel and Hardy films were classic treasures. Steven Bernstein likes to have his cake and eat it too. The Grammy-nominated trumpeter is one of the hardest-working musicians to come out of New York’s “downtown scene.” He recently released three critically-acclaimed CDs on John Zorn’s Tzadik label and has had his music featured on MTV, Saturday Night Live, and National Public Radio. His ensemble, the Millennial Territory Orchestra, is an outgrowth of his immersion in the sound of the Midwestern swing bands from Robert Altman’s movie Kansas City. The ensemble was formed in 1999 for a series of midnight shows at New York’s Tonic nightclub, and they subsequently spent a year and a half in residency at the Jazz Standard. The group, a collection of distinctive musical personalities, recently released its debut recording, MTO Vol. 1, on Sunnyside Records. This is sure to be an edge-of-your-seat performance, featuring swing band adaptations of several rock and soul genre classics, led by this wonderfully “left of center” musician.

Ravi Coltrane Quartet Thursday, October 30, Triple Door

Ravi played so sweetly I just had to post another photo of him. In retrospect it was one of the really grat shows of the 2008 Earshot jazz Festival for me.

Like his legendary father, John Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophonist, bandleader, and composer Ravi Coltrane is dedicated to walking his own musical
path. Considered one of the driving forces in modern jazz today, Coltrane was initially influenced by soul and funk music, R&B, classical music, and film scores before beginning formal musical studies at the California Institute of the Arts in 1986.
After meeting drummer Elvin Jones in 1991, Coltrane relocated to New York, where he performed with a variety of players, including Rashied Ali, Kenny Barron,
and Steve Coleman. He toured regularly with Coleman and appeared on several of Coleman’s albums before producing his first CD, Moving Pictures, in 1997. Since then, Coltrane has produced five more albums, including Legacy, a four-disc, thematic study of his father’s career; Translinear Light, a collaborative project with his mother, pianist Alice Coltrane; and In Flux, featuring pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer E.J. Strickland – his primary ensemble since 2003.
In addition to working and touring with his band, Coltrane launched his own recording company, RKM Music, in 2002. He has also performed with McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Carlos Santana, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Michael Brecker, George Duke, Stanley Clarke, and Branford Marsalis, among others.

Photograph by Seattle photographer Daniel Sheehan, a photojournalist specializing in jazz photography, photojournalism and portrait photography for publications and corporations. He is also a Seattle wedding photographer with a subtle, unobtrusive, story-telling approach creating award winning wedding photojournalism ranking him among the best Seattle wedding photographers.

Blog Directory