Is twerking allowed on the Ronnie Scott’s bandstand? It’s not a conventional jazz manoeuvre; then again, Dee Dee Bridgewater is far from being a conventional jazz singer.
A genuine free spirit, the singer — now 65, but as kittenish as ever — has always married virtuosity with showmanship. On her last visit she blew us away with the help of a remarkable fusion band led by the trumpeter Theo Croker. And here she was, back in town with another trumpeter, Irvin Mayfield, casting a glance back at the origins of jazz in New Orleans.
If the studio version of this project — released earlier in the year as Dee Dee’s Feathers— was rather more plushly upholstered, the slimmed-down version on show in Soho had the looseness of a Big Easy marching band. Although the brief bout of traditional jazz that opened the evening, complete with tailgate trombone from Michael Watson, verged on the cheesy, the rest of the set was an assured celebration of a city that, for all its recent troubles, boasts a unique approach to rhythm. The reeds player Ricardo Pascal completed a spry three-man horn section.
Sporting outsize red spectacles, Bridgewater purred and teased on One Fine Thing, a sultry number composed by one of New Orleans’s younger sons, Harry Connick Jr. Duke Ellington’s Come Sunday paid homage to Mahalia Jackson, while Basin Street Blues found Bridgewater summoning up a gravelly Satchmo growl before she embarked on a playful scat duel with Watson’s trombone.
There was a surfeit of scat vocals elsewhere; Bridgewater sometimes seems to use them as a mask to keep the audience at arm’s length. Still, there was no lack of soulfulness on the band’s cover of Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough. Michael Jackson is anything but orthodox in the eyes of the jazz police. This version really did swing, though.