It was four years ago when a personal quest caught up with Dee Dee Bridgewater.

"I needed to figure out where my African ancestry came from, so when I leave this earth I leave it as a full person," says Bridgewater, by telephone from her home in Henderson, Nevada.

She had tried tracing her genealogy, but the roots of her family came to a dead end before stretching back to slavery. So she tried an alternate route, listening to music from the West African countries slaves had been taken from.

"Every time I listened to music from Mali, it was like I knew this music. Finally, in 2004, I said, I gotta go."

She describes the trip as "mind-blowing." No sooner had she stepped off the plane when an older man approached her thinking she was his niece. She tried to explain in English and French that she was a jazz singer from the United States, but he could not understand and went away very upset.

"I look like the people," says Bridgewater. "I've grown up in a country where we're accepted but we're not, and all my life I've spent trying to fit in or be accepted, or be as good as my white counterparts. For me to go to a black African country and see people who look like me, it was just mind-boggling. To walk the streets and people say hello because I'm one of them..."

Bridgewater made another trip to Mali in August 2006, getting deeper into the music. On her third visit, in October of that year, she recorded the best album of her career, "Red Earth," with her trio and a host of Malian musicians. She will bring many of those same musicians with her to the Eastman Theatre for her Rochester International Jazz Festival performance of "A Malian Journey."

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Bridgewater moved to Flint, Michigan, with her family at the age of 3. Her father was a music teacher who taught Booker Little, Phineas Newborn, and many other jazz greats. He was also a trumpeter, and played with Dinah Washington. Washington, who sometimes served as Bridgewater's babysitter, told her father Dee Dee was going to be a singer.

When she began to sing, Bridgewater loved the blues. But there was a problem. "My mama said no blues," says Bridgewater. "In the black community, for people of my mother's generation, the blues was the devil's music. I couldn't sing the devil's music; I was a good girl."

Bridgewater's career got a boost in the early 1970's, when she became the featured vocalist with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra.

In 1974, when she heard that an all-black version of "The Wizard Of Oz" was starting production, she decided to audition. Bridgewater tried out three times for "The Wiz," but did not get a part, so she took off for Europe with the Jones/Lewis Orchestra. As soon as she arrived back home, she was called in for a fourth audition. This time she won the role of Glinda, the good witch. She won a Tony and can be heard on the original Broadway cast album singing "If You Believe."

She was with the show for two and a half years on Broadway, and then opened the Los Angeles production. But three years as Glinda took its toll.

"It was such a big part of my life that when I finished it took me about six months to get the Glinda smile off my face," says Bridgewater. "People would say, ‘Why are you smiling?' I'd say, ‘I'm not.' ‘Yes you are - and why are you talking in that voice?' I can see from doing that show why actors go crazy."

While she was in "The Wiz" she savored the irony of an all-black production; "The Wizard Of Oz" was written by L. Frank Baum, a notorious racist.

"I was thinking, I'll bet that man is turning over in his grave. We have taken his book and eased it on down the road. Life is great."

After "The Wiz" Bridgewater made occasional forays into acting, including playing Billie Holiday in a one-woman show in Paris. Over the years she has recorded 15 albums and won a Grammy Award for her tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, "Dear Ella," in 1997.

Bridgewater's current album (and concert) is composed of two kinds of songs. On pre-existing Malian songs, she reinterprets the lyrics and brings her jazz sensibility to the arrangements. On these tunes she collaborates with Malian singers, setting up a wonderful contrast of old world and new world that comes through in melody and timbre.

The album also features American tunes that Bridgewater transforms magnificently, singing them over complex African poly-rhythms. Fittingly, the first song she does is "Afro Blue."

"The story that Oscar Brown wrote talks about the drums," says Bridgewater. "I thought it was perfect to start us on this musical and spiritual journal."

The album ends with "Compared To What," a politically charged song by Eugene McDaniels, popularized by Les McCann and Eddie Harris.

"The lyrics of that song are still relevant to what is going on today. We have not progressed, and that was in the 1960's, so that's some sad stuff. I liked the social statements it's making, and I felt that we could incorporate the African rhythms."

In the middle of the album Bridgewater sings "Four Women" as a tribute to Nina Simone, who wrote and sang it.

"It was the first song I listened to in depth at 18," says Bridgewater. She wrote a term paper on it when she attended Michigan State University.

Her future plans include more acting, and producing artists for her own record label. For now, she is particularly proud of her current album and tour, and agrees that it is the pinnacle of her career so far.

"I'm very spiritual, and I'm trying in my last trimester to get to the highest spiritual level. I want to do things that will inspire people to look at their lives differently, look at the world differently. I feel very blessed." 

Dee Dee Bridgewater: A Malian Journey

w/special guest Richard Bona Band

Eastman Theatre, 26 Gibbs St.

Saturday, June 14

8 p.m. | $27.50-$50 | 232-1900, rochesterjazz.com