Jazz Comes Home   

While in town, Bridgewater and his guests will lead sessions and master classes in local schools and will jam Tuesday night at the Cowboy Monkey in downtown Champaign.
    "It'll be a good reinforcement if we can get the people who are coming to perform to go ingot the community and classrooms," he said. "I find that's something that's badly needed, in some cases. Jazz is not the kind of music you hear all over the dial or on television."
    He noted that Jazz Threads, an ambitious project to revive the local jazz scene, involves both town and gown. "I can be a good connection there," Bridgewater said. "I'm from the community and I went to the university."
    Bridgewater was, in fact, a key player ion the local jazz scene in the late 1960s. He left in 1970 for New York City to further his career, first working in pianist Horace Silver's band and then with other groups. He became a mainstay in the bands of drummer Max Roach.
    Over the decades, Bridgewater, now 60, has built a reputation as a hard-working and seasoned trumpet and flugelhorn player as well as composer, arranger, producer and jazz educator. He teaches through community programs such as JazzMobile and is an adjunct professor -- he jokes that he's a full-time adjunct professor -- at the New School for Social Research, the Manhattan School of Music , the Brooklyn Conservatory and William Patterson College.
    As for his trumpet performance, one critic wrote that Bridgewater "tends to play thoughtfully, almost coolly, using silence and simple phrasing, editing himself as he goes along." Another wrote that Bridgewater, with the Roach quarter, "Played thoughtful, low-key, beautifully constructed and subtly expressive solos in ... a warm and quite pure tone."
    Critics often mention his clarity of tone. Neal Tesser of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote that "Bridgewater is a player of such marvelous clarity, one would think his horn had been crafted by Steuben glass."
    some jazz lovers believe that Bridgewater is underrated, or not as well-known as he deserves to be. Bridgewater says that comes with the territory. He related that he once searched on the Web for his grandfather, Preston Bridgewater, who had played cornet with the Barnum & Bailey Circus Band. Preston's name came up a as "Lesser known cornet soloist," his grandson said with a chuckle.
    Preston Bridgewater passed on the music. Cecil's father, also named Cecil, played trumpet in high school and the Navy but not professionally. Cecil remembers his father picking up his horn from time to time at home and allowing him to play it.
    "He was the greatest trumpet player I ever heard, up to a certain pint," Cecil said. "Then he took me to hear Louis Armstrong and I was like, there is another trumpet player in the world." Cecil  was about 10 when Armstrong made a lasting impression on him.
    At that time, Bridgewater was a student at Marquette Grade School in Champaign. Victor Self, the band director, noticed his potential and encouraged his parent to find a private trumpet teacher for their son. Cecil and Erma Bridgewater found Haskell Sexton, then head of the trumpet division at the UI School or Music.
    Cecil studied with Sexton through his high school and college years. At Champaign (now Central) High School, Bridgewater played in all the bands and in the orchestra. His senior year he was first trumpet in the concert band and orchestra and won the school's John Philip Sousa Award for outstanding student musician.
    At the UI, Bridgewater majored in music education even though teaching was the furthest thing on his mind as a career. "At that point, I wanted to perform," he said. He started to do that as a teen-ager, sitting in with his uncle Pete Bridgewater's bands, sometimes after sneaking out of his home.
    As he grew older, Cecil performed with local musicians, including Count Demon, Jack McDuff, Donald Smith, Tony Zamora and Dee Dee Garret, a jazz vocalist who later became his wife. After exhausting what was a vibrant local jazz scene, Bridgewater left school to test himself in the Chicago market.
    After a brief time in the Windy City returned home for a visit and found a draft notice in his mailbox. He enlisted in the Army, ad at Fort Knox immediately volunteered to audition for the 25th Infantry Army Band.
    He had a good audition and was sent for another, at the Naval, now All-Services, School of Music. He again excelled and was asked where he wanted to be stationed. Bridgewater replied New York or Germany. He was sent to Hawaii. Eventually his division was sent to Vietnam and stationed in Cu Chi.
    "You did a lot of what the infantry did but you did music, too," he said. "The war was going on all around us. I never had to go through a jungle and look for people. They would clear a village and then go in got administer medicine to the people. The infantry band would go in and play. We would play at ceremonies on the base as well."
    Bridgewater remembers mortar and machine-gun fire, though and having to man, with two other soldiers, a bunker from 7pm to 7am. "Two of us had to be awake at all times. If they came by and found us asleep, we would be in big trouble," he said. After his two-year stint ended in 1966, Bridgewater had Vietnam nightmares for about eight months.
    Upon Bridgewater's return home, John Gravey talked him into returning to the university. Under Garvey, the UI Jazz Band made a name for itself, performing in jazz festivals, winning competitions and touring the Iron Curtain countries and Russia. Bridgewater was composing and arranging for the band in addition to playing.
    "There was a number of great people doing the judging, : he said. "They would hear me play or my compositions and arrangements and give me feedback. It was a great introduction for me." As a result, Horace Silver and later Thad Jones invited him to play with them.
    In fact, Bridgewater already had a gig lined up with Silver's band when he left Champaign-Urbana for New York. After playing with the group for about seven months, Silver disbanded the group but asked Bridgewater to do some recording with him. The trumpeter was the only band member whom Silver used o his album. "I was honored by that, " Bridgewater said.
    He then joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and later played with Max Roach's quartets or quintets. Over about 30 years, Bridgewater compose for Roach and recoded 30 or 40 albums with him. Bridgewater has appeared on countless other albums and has released two under his own name and two under the Bridgewater Brothers.
    Now he works with his own quartet, quintet and big band and recently was asked to take his band to Japan with his ex-wife, De Dee Bridgewater, now a Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist. They were married from 1970 to 1975 and have remained friends.
    Their daughter, Tulani Bridgewater Kowalski, lives in Los Angeles and works as an assistant to her mother. After his divorce from Dee Dee, Cecil remarried but divorced again. His daughter fro his second marriage, Chelsea Bridgewater attends Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
    Cecil now lives in Brooklyn.
    "Part of the excitement of being in New York is you don't know what you can get called for next," he said. "I get a chance to do a lot of things, Broadway shows and such. I tell people thought, that if the music wasn't here, I wouldn't be here. It's not a fun place to live from the standpoint of expense. But from the standpoint of music, there's no other place I would want to live."
    As part of the Krannert Center's Jazz Threads initiative, Dee Dee Bridgewater will come in December to perform with Cecil, and trumpeter Clark Terry will appear with him in March 2004. At the latter show Cecil Bridgewater and Terry will pay tribute to Pete Bridgewater, Cecil's uncle, a jazz musician and radio how who died a few months ago.
    Both Pete Bridgewater and Cecil V. Bridgewater's father, Cecil B. Bridgewater, who died in 1999, had known Clark Terry since he was 18 or 19 years old and had left his home in St. Louis to try to make it in the music business.
    At one point, Terry became stranded in Champaign and was unable to pay his bill at the Columbia Hotel. To Dodge the clerk, Terry threw his clothes out the hotel window before taking off.
    "Pete would always say, 'Listen, next time you see Clark, ask him if he does windows.'" Cecil related. "When I talked to Clark to ask him if he did windows he would look at me funny and then he would fall down laughing."

[Up]