New Orleans Is "A Living, Breathing Organism"

The last time Dee Dee Bridgewater was in Australia, back in 2011, she was showcasing an album that honoured the life and music of Billie Holliday. This time around, she’s stretched out to embrace a whole city, New Orleans, and 100 years of the music to which it gave birth – jazz – in one album, Dee Dee’s Feathers. 

“Well, it wasn’t intended to be an album in the beginning,” Bridgewater admits. “Originally I had suggested to Irvin [Mayfield] that we do a recording that we could sell at the New Orleans Jazz Market that he’s at the helm of creating. I had the idea when we did the groundbreaking ceremony in February last year, and I’d suggested we record all songs about New Orleans. One month later we were in the studio recording – we did this album in three days – and it came out so phenomenally well that, after listening to it, he said, ‘Oh no, we need to put this out as a real commercial CD.’

"It’s about the rebirth of this city as a phoenix, coming out of the ashes of the horrible, devastating Hurricane Katrina."

“I think the beauty of this CD is the sense of joy that kind of jumps out of the speakers. You can hear this immense joy and this love and this camaraderie between Irvin and the musicians of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and myself. It’s about the joy that this city brings; it’s about the rebirth of this city as a phoenix, coming out of the ashes of the horrible, devastating Hurricane Katrina, and it’s about looking forward – it’s of life itself.

“New Orleans is hard to describe because it’s very palpable. It’s like a living, breathing organism, the whole city, and I marvel every time I go there. I’m captivated by the history, by the food, by this kind of infectious energy that engulfs me. I’m a totally different animal when I’m down in New Orleans.”

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Flint, Michigan, herself, Bridgewater lived in France for almost 24 years, which meant that New Orleans’ origins as a French colonial port also resonated with her.

“It’s like walking through a living museum,” she continues, “and the fact that it is considered to be the birthplace of jazz with this long lineage of amazing trumpet players that have come out of that city — there’s all of that in there. So it’s a city that speaks to me on just so many levels.”

For all the obvious love and excitement in the creation of Dee Dee’s Feathers, recognising that New Orleans music per se is not her specialty, Bridgewater deferred to Mayfield to produce the album.

“For the first time, not having to be in the control booth and at the centre of everything, it was beautiful,” she admits. “All I had to do is go in and sing, and I haven’t done that since I started producing myself in 1993. So it was a lovely experience for me and we did things that I don’t know that we would have done if we were recording the album to be a commercial entity. So we allowed ourselves a lot of freedom.”