Dee Dee Bridgewater was born Denise Eileen Garrett on May 27, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised Catholic in Flint, Michigan. Her father, Matthew Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher at Manassas High School who put jazz records in front of her early; by sixteen she was already singing in rock and R&B groups around Michigan clubs. She enrolled at Michigan State University at eighteen, then transferred to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where in 1969 she toured the Soviet Union with the school's jazz big band — an early, formative brush with life as a touring musician.

In 1970 she married trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and moved to New York City, taking the stage name Dee Dee Bridgewater. She became lead vocalist for the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra in the early 1970s — her true professional jazz debut — and worked alongside Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, and Dexter Gordon, appearing at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1973. Her recording career started the following year with the Tokyo-recorded Afro Blue (1974, Trio Records), a soul-jazz date built around her brothers Cecil (trumpet) and Ron Bridgewater (tenor sax) alongside pianist Roland Hanna and bassist George Mraz. That same year she joined the original Broadway cast of The Wiz as Glinda the Good Witch, a run that earned her the 1975 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

The rest of the 1970s pulled her toward pop, funk, and disco rather than jazz. She released a self-titled album on Atlantic (1976), then moved to Elektra for Just Family (1978, produced and arranged by Stanley Clarke) and Bad For Me (1979, produced by George Duke), followed by a second self-titled Elektra album (1980) produced by Philadelphia-soul architect Thom Bell. She also worked in film during this stretch, appearing in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979) and later The Brother from Another Planet (1984), and returned to musical theater in 1986 playing Billie Holiday in a London production of Lady Day, which brought her a Laurence Olivier Award nomination — a role that would resurface, decades later, in her own Holiday tribute album.

Touring France in 1984 with Sophisticated Ladies led Bridgewater to relocate to Paris in 1986, where she would live for roughly fifteen years. It was there, working steadily with a tight circle of French and Paris-based jazz musicians, that she rebuilt her reputation as a serious jazz vocalist rather than a theater-and-pop performer — a shift audible on Live in Paris (1987, recorded at the New Morning), Victim of Love (1989, which paired her with Ray Charles on "Precious Thing"), In Montreux (1990, a live set from the Montreux Jazz Festival), and Keeping Tradition (1993), which earned her first Grammy nomination as a leader. The Verve years that followed cemented the turn: Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver (1995), Prelude to a Kiss: The Duke Ellington Album (1996, recorded with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra), and then Dear Ella (1997), her tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, which won her the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. A separate Grammy from that same ceremony, for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), went to arranger Slide Hampton for his chart on "Cotton Tail" — a distinction that gets flattened in shorthand descriptions of Bridgewater as a "three-time" Grammy winner, when the trophy itself belongs to Hampton, not to her.

The 2000s carried her through a run of songbook projects — Live at Yoshi's (2000) and This Is New (2002), both built around Kurt Weill's catalog, then J'ai Deux Amours (2005), a set of French chansons recorded partly during a residency at the Kennedy Center. In 2007 she made her most personal record to date: Red Earth - A Malian Journey, recorded in Bamako and Paris after DNA and genealogical research traced her ancestry to Mali. She worked directly with Malian musicians — kora player Toumani Diabaté and vocalists Oumou Sangaré and Ramata Diakité among them — reworking her own catalog (including a new version of "Afro Blue") alongside Malian material, and the sessions were documented in the companion film Motherland. She founded her own label, DDB Records, around this period, giving her direct control over her catalog going forward.

In 2010 she released Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie with Love from Dee Dee Bridgewater, using Holiday's birth name and correct birth year in the title as a way of separating the woman from the myth — the album won the 2011 Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, her second personal Grammy win. She followed it with two records rooted explicitly in Southern Black music history: Dee Dee's Feathers (2015), a New Orleans-themed collaboration with trumpeter Irvin Mayfield and his 18-piece New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and Memphis... Yes, I'm Ready (2017), a homecoming album cut at Royal Studios — the historic Hi Records room in her birthplace — with Kirk Whalum and producer Boo Mitchell, leaning into the Southern soul and blues she grew up on rather than jazz repertoire. In 2019 she founded The Woodshed Network, a mentorship program supporting women in jazz through career development and community-building, run alongside her daughter Tulani Bridgewater-Kowalski, who manages her career and DDB Productions. Her other daughter, China Moses (from her marriage to director Gilbert Moses), is also a professional singer.

The Recording Academy has nominated Bridgewater for a Grammy seven separate times beyond her two wins — for Live in Paris (1989), Keeping Tradition (1994), Love and Peace (1995), Live at Yoshi's (2000), J'ai Deux Amours (2005), Red Earth (2007), and most recently Elemental (nominated at the 2026 ceremony). That last album, released in June 2025 on Mack Avenue, is a duo collaboration with pianist Bill Charlap working through the Ellington/Porter/Waller songbook — evidence that, past seventy-five, she's still actively recording rather than coasting on her catalog. She was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2017, hosted NPR's syndicated JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater from October 2001 to October 2014, serves as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Goodwill Ambassador, and in April 2025 was made an Officier in France's Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur, adding to an earlier Commandeur rank in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and her status as the first American inducted into the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie.

Bridgewater's singing carries the stamp of a performer who spent her formative years on a Broadway stage rather than exclusively in jazz clubs: a theatrical command of phrasing, character, and storytelling that she brought back into jazz once she recommitted to it in Paris in the late 1980s. That theatrical instinct shows most clearly in her songbook and tribute projects — Dear Ella, Prelude to a Kiss, This Is New — where she treats each standard as a small piece of narrative rather than a vehicle for vocal display alone, though she is also a formidable scat singer in the bebop tradition, a skill documented across her live recordings from Live in Paris onward. Her catalog resists a single lane more than most vocalists' do: it runs from 1970s Stanley Clarke-and-George-Duke-produced funk and disco, through French chanson (J'ai Deux Amours) and West African collaboration (Red Earth, built directly with Malian musicians after she traced her ancestry to Mali), to Memphis soul and blues (Memphis... Yes, I'm Ready, recorded in the Hi Records room that shaped Al Green's sound). What holds it together is a fifteen-year immersion in the Paris jazz scene that gave her the harmonic and improvisational grounding to make all of those later genre excursions sound like extensions of a jazz sensibility rather than departures from one.