8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Elemental' Review: Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bill Charlap's Inventive Interpretations
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.
