Innate when Denise Eileen Garrett within Memphis, Tennessee, she grew up inside Flint, Michigan. Her father, Matthew Garrett, was the jazz trumpeter & teacher at Manassas High School, & across his play, Denise was involved to jazz early. At the age of xvi, she was the member of a rock & rythm'north'blues trio, singing around clubs around Michigan. At Xviii, she exposed at a Michigan State University before she went to the University of Illinois. By owning their combo, she toured a Soviet Union in 1969. A next season, she met trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, and when their marriage, it moved to New York City, where Cecil played around Horace Silver's band.

Inside 1971, Dee Dee Bridgewater joined the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestra as a lead singer. A next years marked a beginning of her jazz career, & she performed by having several of the low jazzman of the period, like Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, and others. Around 1974, her first possess album, entitled Dee Dee Bridgewater, appeared, & she likewise performed in Broadway in the musical The Wiz. For her role when Glinda the Good Witch she won a Tony Award in 1975 as "best featured actress", & a musical comedy as well won a 1976 Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album.

She afterward appeared within many more stage productions. When touring France in 1984 with the musical Sophisticated Ladies, she moved to Paris in 1986. A equivalent season saw her around Lady Day when 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 comedy to jazz. She performed at a Montreux Jazz Festival in 1990, and little joe years late, she eventually collaborated sustaining Horace Silver, whom she had admired since yearn, & freed a album Love & Peace: The Tribute to Horace Silver. Her 1997 tribute album Dear Ella won her the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and a 1998 album ''Live at Yoshi's was as well worth the Grammy nomination. She has too explored on This is News a songs of Kurt Weill, and, in her latest album J'ai Deux Amours'', a French Classics.

Dee Dee Bridgewater is the 1st Western to exist as inducted to the Haute Conseille diamond state la Francophonie. She has received a Award of Arts & Letters inside France.

Dee Dee Bridgewater is mother to ternion babies, Tulani Bridgewater (from either either either her marriage to Cecil Bridgewater), China Moses (from her marriage to theater, film & television director Gilbert Moses) & Gabriel Durand (from her todays marriage to French concert promoter Jean-Marie Durand).