Dee Dee Bridgewater is one of jazz’s finest singers—a classic vocalist in the mould of Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson and Betty Carter, women who not only shaped the sound of the music but were her mentors. Yet to reduce Bridgewater's contributions to just one genre would be to miss out on entire worlds of her expression. Born in Memphis and raised in Flint, Michigan, Bridgewater started out singing in the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra in the early ’70s. It didn’t take long before she’d spread out stylistically, beyond the traditional jazz sound of her 1974 solo debut, Afro Blue, to leave her mark on funk, R&B, soul, disco and so much more in the decades to follow. This playlist attempts to survey the wide range of her repertoire through some of her key tracks—a number of which she tells Apple Music about below. “I Can’t Get Next to You” “The music on Memphis …Yes, I’m Ready was music I knew and grew up listening to on the famed radio station WDIA. My father, Matthew Garrett, was one of the first on-air DJs alongside B.B. King and Rufus Thomas. I used to listen to the station late nights in my teen years and dreamed of being a soul singer, with background singers, a horn section, replete with costumes and choreography. I love this album, and my favourite song to perform live is the Al Green classic 'I Can’t Get Next to You'. This album helped me through the grief of my mother’s passing that year. It lifted my spirits, made me dance and celebrated Memphis and the historic Soulsville era.” “It Ain’t Easy” “This Allen Toussaint song was suggested to me by the album’s original producer, Jerry Wexler. I chose the song because of the story the lyrics told. It’s speaking to the difficulties one faces when trying to achieve something, making it by oneself—keeping focused. For that album, Dee Dee Bridgewater, I had an artist’s contract with Atlantic Records. The producer compiled songs that we listened to and selected together. After that, I had no artistic say about how the songs were treated, recorded; never met the musicians nor background vocalists. I showed up at the studio, listened to the arrangement and recorded the lead vocal.” “For the Girls” “I was working with George Duke and Larry Dunn from Earth, Wind & Fire. I was living in LA, married to my second husband, Gilbert Moses, and our marriage was very tumultuous. And it was just a wild time. It was the ’70s and it was wild. And so when I did that album [1979’s Bad for Me], I was separated from Gilbert—that was speaking to that moment in my life. It was really reflective of what I was going through at that time.” “Afro Blue” “I loved [the song’s writer] Mongo Santamaria, and I loved to go down and listen to him. So when Oscar Brown Jr. added the lyrics to the song, it just really struck a chord with me, because I loved the story. 'Dream of a land my soul is from, I hear a hand stroke on a drum.' I loved the connection going back to the motherland. You can trace the evolution of the United States with my background: Native American, Chickasaw, Cherokee; I have Chinese on my father's side. Irish, German. So I didn't even know anything African except that my ancestors came from Africa. I didn't have that oral history tradition in my family. So that song for me was the connection to Africa. When I sing it, I visualise this beautiful Black couple and I see them somewhere on the continent.”