Red Earth - A Malian Journey

Though it’s been touted as an exploratory piece of afro-jazz fusion, Dee Dee Bridgewater’s revelatory Red Earth: A Malian Journey is as much a nostalgic love letter to the heroes of early seventies soul-jazz as it is an exercise in cross cultural genre bending. At least half of Red Earth is devoted to ambitious reworkings of socially and musically progressive soul-jazz classics: Nina Simone’s “Four Women”, Gene McDaniels’ “Compared To What”, Wayne Shorter’s lithe “Long Time Ago”, and Bridgewater’s own masterwork “Afro Blue.” Bridgewater brings life to these potentially worn out standards by fleshing out their traditional arrangements with a fearsome array of Malian instrumentalists, who find a way of morphing even the relatively straight ahead “Four Women” into a polyrhythmic free for all. It is this willingness to experiment that makes magic out of the combination of Bridgewater’s relatively traditional, Dinah Washington inspired vocal tones, and the lilting Malian melodies of tunes like “Griots” and “No More.” Despite her stridently American vocal inflections Bridgewater always sounds completely at ease with the serpentine arrangements provided by her accompanists, making Red Earth one of the most refreshingly vital jazz albums of recent years.