via The Wall Street Journal
On an exuberantly original new album, the singer and pianist reimagine jazz standards from Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and others.
The songs that constitute the Great American Songbook will bend, but they won’t break. This body of music is infinitely flexible. You can take a number by Duke Ellington or Cole Porter and reinterpret it—or twist it around until it’s barely recognizable—in a way I wouldn’t advise trying with a composition by Beethoven or even John Lennon.
On their new album, “Elemental,” singer Dee Dee Bridgewater and pianist Bill Charlap push interpretation to its limits, starting with some very familiar jazz standards. Rather than digging down into their chord changes and devising new melodies on top of them, as has come to be the common practice in the modern jazz era, they create variations on the tunes as originally written.
On the album’s opening number, “Beginning to See the Light,” Ms. Bridgewater and Mr. Charlap do more than create a new version of that Duke Ellington classic, coming close to reinventing both the piano and even the human voice as an instrument. The first thing we hear is Ms. Bridgewater making some wordless noises with her mouth, followed by a few apparently random notes from both the bass and treble ends of Mr. Charlap’s keyboard. The two then lunge into Ellington’s music and Don George’s lyrics, first relentlessly stretching out phrases and then compressing them, as if they were made of musical Silly Putty.
Throughout the album, Ms. Bridgewater switches from one voice to another. On “See the Light” she shifts into a coy, little-girl tone, and at the end of the song she goes up into a soprano head voice, rather like an opera diva. At times on the album, Mr. Charlap sounds like a Harlem stride pianist circa 1930, while at others he could be a blues man from the Mississippi Delta. At some moments he goes for baroque.
That “Elemental” contains three numbers from the Ellington songbook—the others being “Mood Indigo” and “Caravan”— makes sense in that the composer continually tinkered with his own tunes. Sometimes he merely rearranged them, as with “Mood Indigo” on his 1966 “The Popular Duke Ellington.” And sometimes he reworked them from the ground up, as on the 1962 “Money Jungle” album, which contains a barely recognizable “Caravan.”
Mr. Charlap starts “Mood Indigo” with a run of Ellingtonesque, lightly dissonant intervals that suggests the composer’s 1959 piano piece “The Single Petal of a Rose.” But Ms. Bridgewater reminds us that the song and its overall mood are too sad for us to spend too much time thinking about roses—she’s “just a soul who is bluer than blue can be.” Mr. Charlap lightly sprinkles those dissonances throughout the track, making them the focal point of his instrumental solo. This is as close as “Elemental” comes to an out-and-out blues; both singer and pianist skate around the edge of the form throughout, without ever quite diving in.
“Honeysuckle Rose” is an upbeat jam-session favorite, and the Bridgewater-Charlap version is one of the more jubilant tracks here. The two proceed in highly staccato fashion, with Mr. Charlap stridently laying down tiny bits of melody that gradually coalesce into a coherent tune, while Ms. Bridgewater hops around from one note to another like a barefoot woman trying to negotiate a hot beach—and her wordless improv includes a few bars of whistling.
“Here’s That Rainy Day” is the project’s heaviest ballad, and the two partners sustain the darker mood even while reducing the tune to its barest essentials. Ms. Bridgewater sings Johnny Burke’s words relatively straightforwardly while Mr. Charlap backs her up with as few notes as possible. The use of the word “funny” has never seemed more ironic; the situation here is anything but.
“’S Wonderful” is a perfect choice for this project; the 1927 George and Ira Gershwin classic is a song that almost literally deconstructs itself: The melody emerges from a series of syncopated notes and the words are likewise deliberately fragmented in a way that employs topical slang as a kind of verbal syncopation. The collaborators here take the Gershwins’ idea even further; they turn the whole piece into a series of stop-and-start phrases—and, as in most of the songs on the LP, they take advantage of the essential familiarity of the material. Since the audience knows the songs so well, the performers feel they can take more chances with them, going way out on melodic limbs.
The result? They sound better than ever.