Jazz festival goes old school when pair take Fox Tucson stage

When Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bill Charlap take the Fox Tucson Theatre stage on Friday, Jan. 23, they have one overriding goal for the audience:

Take them back to a time when the world didn't move so fast.

"We are here to help you breathe, relax and forget," Bridgewater explained during a phone call from a concert stop last week with pianist Charlap at New York's iconic Birdland Jazz Club. "Let's imagine. Let's go into some very sweet, imaginary spaces where life was innocent, because that's when these songs were written."

The pair's concert, a coproduction of the HSL Properties Tucson Jazz Festival and Tucson Desert Song Festival, will center on their 2025 Grammy-nominated album "Elemental," reinventions of jazz standards and classics from the Great American Songbook by Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jimmy Van Heusen.

Charlap and Bridgewater, a three-time Grammy winner, did not set out to reinvent the wheel on these songs when they recorded the album in 2023, two years after they started performing together.

"No decision was made except for 'turn on the red light and let's go'," said Charlap, a critically acclaimed jazz pianist who won a Grammy for "The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern," his 2015 collaboration with Tony Bennett. "It's about this communication that happens, and part of that is that Dee Dee is so multidimensional. She's a great storyteller, a great actor, a great musician, a great improvising musician, a great interpreter of the lyric. And then her vocal range and equipment and technical ability are peerless."

Much of their performance on Friday will feel improvised, created on the spot as Bridgewater and Charlap follow one another's lead.

"We are apt to go anywhere and everywhere, and it depends on what one person might play, how I might sing a phrase," Bridgewater said. "He might take that phrase and incorporate it into his solo, or react to it in the moment and give me an idea, and then I'll take what he's done and incorporate it into how I'm phrasing the next part of the songs that we're doing."

Because it's just the two of them on stage, they have the freedom to go where the moment takes them, Bridgewater said.

"So it really does become about the story of each of these songs," explained the 75-year-old singer/actress who won a Tony Award in 1975 for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in the original Broadway production of "The Wiz." "I think what makes it unique is that I'm bringing these really fine-tuned interpretations of the songs to the people. And I mean, I have people coming up to me all the time and saying, 'I never understood this song until you performed it the way you did. Thank you'."

Bridgewater and Charlap met through Charlap's wife, jazz composer and pianist Renee Rosnes.

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"I kind of have what I call my spirit voice, and it spoke to me and said, 'Bill Charlap'," Bridgewater said. "And I thought that was unusual, but I followed my voice."

The pair initially started performing about 20 shows a year as their schedules allowed. Charlap spends most of his time with his namesake trio, with whom he has recorded 20 albums over 27 years. Bridgewater's career includes her solo shows and performing American activist songs with her all-woman quartet, We Exist! 

At the pair's show Friday at Fox Tucson, 17 W. Congress St., those familiar American Songbook songs might sound different than you remember them. Instead of intentional arrangements, Bridgewater and Charlap go old school, the way jazz was when Bridgewater was before other musical influences came into play.

"I grew up at the end of an era when musicians didn't have arrangements, and they would just go on stage and they'd call a tune and then they would wing it," she said. "It's kind of going back to that way of doing things. ... I feel we've taken the music back to its essence of what jazz improvisation is about."

"It's like dancing partners," Charlap said. "There's such trust of the nuance of time and the dance. You're watching two dance partners so there's that kind of trust and the ability to land on our feet."

A limited number of tickets ($56-$90) for Friday's show are available through foxtucson.org. 

More Jazz Festival events

The 2026 Jazz Festival closing weekend also includes:

• Jenny Scheinman’s All Species Parade at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22, at The Century Room, 311 E. Congress St.

• "Emmet Cohen Presents: Miles and Coltrane at 100," a co-presentation with Arizona Arts Live, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Rialto Theatre, 311 E. Congress St.

• "ELEW Plays Sting," with pianist Eric Lewis at 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23, at The Century Room.

• Afterglow with Morani Sanders, 7 p.m. Friday at The Lounge at the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave.

• Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt with UA Studio Jazz Ensemble, 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 24, at Hotel Congress Plaza, 311 E. Congress St.

• Joe Farnsworth Big Room Quartet, featuring Sarah Hanahan, Luther Allison and Yasushi Nakamura, 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday at The Century Room.

• Jazz-funk fusion guitarist Cory Wong, 8 p.m. Saturday at Fox Tucson Theatre.