Dee Dee Bridgewater (b. May 27, 1950) is an American Jazz singer. She is a… Read Full Bio ↴Dee Dee Bridgewater (b. May 27, 1950) is an American Jazz singer. She is a two-time Grammy Award Winner, Tony Award Winner and Host of NPR's Syndicated Radio show "JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater". She is a United Nations Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Born Denise Eileen Garrett in Memphis, Tennessee, she grew up in Flint, Michigan. Her father, Matthew Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher at Manassas High School, and through his playing, Denise was exposed to jazz early on. At the age of sixteen, she was a member of a rock and rhythm'n'blues trio, singing in clubs in Michigan. At 18, she studied at Michigan State University before she went to the University of Illinois. With their jazz band, she toured the Soviet Union in 1969. The next year, she met trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, and after their marriage, they moved to New York City, where Cecil played in Horace Silver's band.

In 1971, Dee Dee Bridgewater joined the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra as the lead vocalist. The next years marked the beginning of her jazz career, and she performed with many of the great jazz musicians of the time, such as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, and others. In 1974, her first own album, entitled Afro Blue, appeared, and she also performed on Broadway in the musical The Wiz. For her role as Glinda the Good Witch she won a Tony Award in 1975 as "best-featured actress", and the musical also won the 1976 Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album.

She subsequently appeared in several other stage productions. After touring France in 1984 with the musical Sophisticated Ladies, she moved to Paris in 1986. The same year saw her in Lady Day as Billie Holliday, for which role she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she returned from the world of musical to jazz. She performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1990, and four years later, she finally collaborated with Horace Silver, whom she had admired for a long time, and released the album Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver. Her 1997 tribute album Dear Ella won her the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and the 1998 album Live at Yoshi's was also worth a Grammy nomination. She has also explored on This is New the songs of Kurt Weill, and, on her latest album J'ai Deux Amours, the French Classics.

Dee Dee Bridgewater is the first American to be inducted to the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie. She has received the Award of Arts and Letters in France.

Dee Dee Bridgewater is mother to three children, Tulani Bridgewater (from her marriage to Cecil Bridgewater), China Moses (from her marriage to theater, film and television director Gilbert Moses) and Gabriel Durand (from her current marriage to French concert promoter Jean-Marie Durand).

Love Takes Chances
Dee Dee Bridgewater Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

We've held our line
You can't untangle rules
We won't give in-no way
To empty promises

The wind has changed
We're miles away from nowhere
Then you were there

With your body touching mine
So sensually
Feelings so intense
So hypnotic so sublime
Then I knew

Loves takes chances
There's no reason why
No romance is guaranteed to be
Each word that's unspoken
Captured with just one glance
Your love must take chances
That's the mystery

Then you were there
With your body touching mine
So sensually
Feelings so intense
So hypnotic so sublime

Your Loves not takes chances
There is no reason why
You know there is no romance that is guaranteed to be
Each word that's unspoken
Captured with just one glance
You know that your love must take chances
And that is the mystery
Please listen to me baby
You got the chance baby
There is no reason why
You know there is no romance that is guaranteed
Listen to me baby
When I say that
Each word that's unspoken

Yeah each word unspoken
Is captured with just one glance…

Overall Meaning

The opening lines of Dee Dee Bridgewater's song Love Takes Chances seem to be a declaration of defiance. The singer and her lover have "held [their] line," refusing to compromise on their principles or let anyone talk them into doing something they don't want to do. They are not willing to give in to "empty promises" or be swayed by someone else's agenda. This kind of resolve can sometimes make it difficult for two people to come together, and it seems that the singer and her lover were "miles away from nowhere" until they found each other.

Then, suddenly, everything changes. The wind shifts, and the two of them are drawn together in a moment of intense physical and emotional connection. The singer describes the experience in vivid sensory detail, with her lover's body "touching" hers and sending her into a state of hypnosis. It's as if the world around them fades away, leaving only the two of them in an irresistible moment of bliss. It's in this moment that the singer realizes that love takes chances - that it's not enough to simply hold one's line and refuse to be swayed by outside forces. To truly experience love, one has to be willing to take chances - to risk everything to be with the person who sets one's heart on fire.

Overall, Love Takes Chances is a song about the power of love to break down barriers and transform lives. It's about the way that true love requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to let go of one's defenses and take a chance on another person. And it's about the magic of those moments when two people find each other, and the world falls away, leaving nothing but them and their love.

Line by Line Meaning

We've held our line
We have stayed committed to our beliefs and principles

You can't untangle rules
Rules cannot be easily ignored or broken

We won't give in-no way
We refuse to surrender or compromise

To empty promises
We have no interest in false or meaningless assurances

The wind has changed
Circumstances have shifted

We're miles away from nowhere
We feel lost or directionless

Then you were there
You suddenly appeared in my life

With your body touching mine
We were physically close to each other

So sensually
The experience was deeply sensual and intimate

Feelings so intense
Our emotions were very strong

So hypnotic so sublime
The experience was mesmerizing and beautiful