The legends, standards and lessons that shaped jazz vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater

By Ria Andriani

ABC Jazz

Legendary vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater says jazz is freedom. (Supplied: Niccolo Bruna)

For more than five decades, Dee Dee Bridgewater has been one of jazz's most distinctive voices.

She began her career with the legendary Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra and has shared stages with jazz greats including Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie.

A multiple Grammy and Tony Award winner, her career has spanned not only music but also acting, broadcasting and founding her own record label.

Bridgewater was due to return to Australia this October for her first tour in almost 12 years. 

However, just days before her first performance, it was announced that her Australian and Asian tour had been cancelled due to ill health.

We spoke with Bridgewater ahead of her planned tour. She reflects on unforgettable encounters with Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie, shares the songs closest to her heart, and offers advice for the next generation of musicians.

What is it about jazz that sustains you and gives you lifelong pleasure?

It's a music that is free.

Jazz is freedom of speech, is freedom of expression. It's just complete freedom.

Dee Dee Bridgewater encourages young artists to learn as much as possible about the business side of music. 
(Supplied: Hernan Rodriguez)

I don't have to be any one particular way.

I can improvise and change the music nightly and find new ways to interpret a song in different kinds of musical settings.

Then, to watch other jazz artists take the music and go places that I wouldn't think of going.

I don't know any other music [where] everyone is able to create their own world.

What was it like working with jazz legends like Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie?

When I first moved to New York with my first husband, Cecil Bridgewater, sometimes the phone would ring and it would be Sonny.

He'd say: "Dee Dee, this is Sonny Rollins … would you come and sing with me?"

And I was like, "Of course I'll sing with Sonny Rollins! Are you kidding?"

From the 1950s until his death in 2026, Sonny Rollins was a pioneering force of jazz. His towering figure
and bellowing brilliance on the tenor, certainly earned him the title of saxophone colossus.
Photo courtesy The New Yorker

So, I would do these afternoon shows with Sonny for some jazz society in New York.

As my career developed, we would occasionally see each other at festivals or awards ceremonies.

I just knew him as a person. He was a really nice man and not at all pretentious.

Dizzy Gillespie … oh, I loved working with Dizzy.

Dizzy loved to make people laugh. He would blow those cheeks up and he'd look like a puffer fish. And then all those notes would come out.

We had so much fun together and he was a jokester offstage.

What are your three favourite jazz standards?

Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life

I have always been astounded that someone in their teen years could write such a deep song.

It appeals to my dramatic senses and it's a challenging song to sing musically.

George David Weiss and Bob Thiele: What a Wonderful World

Singing that song always brings about a sense of peace and calm.

The clouds, the rain, the children, seeing people; it just reminds us of the beauty of humanity in the world. And it's just a beautiful melody.

Johnny Burke: Here's That Rainy Day

It's a ballad I have sung since I began singing professionally with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, [but] I've just started doing that song again recently.

I was about to sing it for one of my shows and got news that someone who I was very close to had passed.

[Years ago], he had asked me to marry him, and I was afraid to do it because he was Jewish and I was Black in the 70s.

I thought it would have been very difficult for us.

I was terrified when I was young of what that kind of a relationship could entail.

So, I said no, [even though] he was someone that I really did love.

Maybe I could have saved those leftover dreams. 

Funny. 

Here's that rainy day.

I realized that I had not been brave enough to go with this love that we both felt, [which fills me with] a very big tinge of regret.

It's still hard to sing, but I do like singing it because it has a totally different meaning for me now. 

What advice would you give aspiring musicians, especially young women?

I say to all young women, no matter which area of jazz they want to work in, whether they're instrumentalists or vocalists or even sound engineers behind the scenes, the most important thing when you are young is to gather as much knowledge about what it is you want to do.

You [need to be] well-armed to go into the profession, to know as much about the business side of whatever it is that you want to do.

Know how to take care of yourself, know your rights as a musician when you're coming out, know how to read contracts.

And I always say to young musicians: create safe spaces so that they can create their music.

Then whatever your music is going to be, you've got to do it to the best that you can possibly do.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

First published at ABC News, October 20, 2026

Tim Winton's Cloudstreet named number one in ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books

By Nicola Heath and Claire Nichols

Four Tim Winton novels made it into the Top 100 Australian Books, with Cloudstreet named number one.

When Tim Winton wrote the last lines of Cloudstreet, he had no notion of how successful the book would be.

He was on the Greek island of Hydra, on the tail end of a European residency that had taken him and his growing family to Paris and rural Ireland.

When, in 1988, his wife Denise became pregnant with their second child, they decided to return home to Western Australia, where Winton grew veggies, fished and knuckled down to edit his manuscript.

By the time it was due to go to print in 1991, the outlook was not great.

"We were publishing it into a hideous recession," Winton tells ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.

"Interest rates were at 17.5 per cent. The economy was just really struggling. People were doing it hard. We were broke ourselves.

"By the time the book came out, we had no money."

The dire economic circumstances prompted his publishers, Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble, to release the book as a more affordable paperback rather than as a pricier hardcover.

But despite their concerns, it was immediately clear they had a hit on their hands.

"Within a week, it was just doing mad things," Winton says.

"That was the book that saved us."

Thirty-five years on, Cloudstreet has been adapted for radio, theatre, opera and television and has never been out of print.

"It's been translated into so many languages," Winton says.

"I still get mail. It's an odd phenomenon that I just can't account for."

His readers are in no doubt as to the book's appeal, however.

With more than 280,000 votes counted, Cloudstreet has placed first in Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books.

Three other Winton novels made the list, with Breath (2008) coming in at 33, Dirt Music (2001) at 41 and Juice (2024) at 88.

'A bravura performance'

Winton was just 21 when he won the 1981 Australian/Vogel Literary Award for his first novel, An Open Swimmer.

His next novel, Shallows, published three years later, won his first Miles Franklin Literary Award.

He published two more novels, That Eye, the Sky and In the Winter Dark, by the time he started work on Cloudstreet in the late 80s.

"[Cloudstreet] was a book that I was thinking about all of that time," Winton says.

"I needed to build up to it because it was a bravura sort of performance in a way. It took a lot of nerve, and I didn't have that nerve for a long time. I needed to work on my chops during my 20s."

"Cloudstreet is, in its way, an unapologetic celebration of the white working class,
with all its follies and vices and blind spots," Winton writes. (Supplied: Penguin)

Cloudstreet follows the fortunes of two families — the Lambs and the Pickles — over two decades in mid-20th-century Perth.

It won Winton his second Miles Franklin, an award he has now won four times (Dirt Music took it out in 2002 and Breath in 2009).

Dedicated to his grandparents, Cloudstreet draws on the tall tales Winton heard as a child, hiding under the table during family lunches.

He remembers being transfixed by his grandparents' voices, so different to his own.

"They sounded like they were from a different world," he says.

"I was a child of the space age, and my grandparents were people from the horse and cart era. They sounded like people in a Chips Rafferty movie."

The stories took on a sacred cast with each retelling, bringing long-dead family members back to life.

Growing up in a family of storytellers and larger-than-life characters shaped Winton as a writer.

"All that tale-­spinning around the table … embedded itself in my memory," he writes in That Book, the final essay in his new collection, Songs from the Firefront.

In Cloudstreet, Winton sought to honour that lost world.

"It was hitching a ride on that oral storytelling tradition which was fading in white working-class culture in the 60s and 70s, and which I clung to and tried to reinvigorate in the 80s."

A metaphor for society

Cloudstreet's industrious matriarch, Oriel Lamb, is modelled on Winton's paternal grandmother, Olive.

Like Oriel, Olive Winton lived in a tent under the mulberry bush in the backyard for 30 years.

"I just thought it was normal," Winton says. "I thought everybody's nana lived in a tent."

His grandmother was diminutive but "mighty" in character.

"She was tiny, but a very impressive person," Winton says. "She'd had a really tough life."

Born into a poor family in Albany at the turn of the century, Olive left school to care for her siblings before working as a scullery maid for a wealthy family in Subiaco.

Despite her limited education, she loved poetry.

"Language was precious to her," Winton says.

"She'd reel off hundreds and hundreds of lines of [19th-century poets] Longfellow and Browning … That was a big influence on me as a kid."

The Wintons, like the Lambs, were hardworking, driven by a Protestant work ethic.

In contrast, the Mifflins — Winton's mother's family — were, like the Pickles, reliant on luck: "More carefree, more feckless, not religious at all," Winton says. "[They] lived it up."

While the two branches of Winton's family never resided under one roof, the Lambs and the Pickles live side-by-side in Cloudstreet, the source of much of the novel's tension.

Winton came to see this juxtaposition as a metaphor for society more broadly.

"That's what a culture is, that's what a village is, that's what a neighbourhood is," he says.

"People of all sorts and different inspirations and possessed by different impulses trying to get along, trying to make peace with their differences and trying to find each other interesting."

A new appreciation for history

Cloudstreet may be an Australian classic, but Winton wrote much of the manuscript abroad.

He had never travelled overseas before, and the homesickness he felt imbued his writing.

"It's a kind of physical affliction. I felt like my skin had been peeled," he says.

The geographic distance provided Winton with the perspective he needed to see his home anew.

"It clarified my thinking, and it was helpful to me," he says.

Winton says he believes "there is poetry in ordinary people's speech, and … honour in ordinary people's lives". 
(ABC News: Rhiannon Shine)

At the time, the Perth of Winton's childhood was being demolished in the name of progress, replaced by modern, characterless buildings and freeways.

"Perth had a provincial shame about old houses and buildings, and a misplaced pride in the shiny stuff it could erect in their stead," Winton writes in That Book.

In Europe, Winton encountered a different way of life, one that honoured the past and preserved the built environment.

In Ireland, Winton lived in the shadow of a medieval castle; his son went to kindy in Paris over the road from where Balzac lived more than a century before; while the drama of the Odyssey unfolded across the water from where he lived in Greece.

In white working-class Perth, where connections did not extend "back beyond a generation or two", history was not valued in the same way.

The energy he felt in centuries-old European buildings — "storied places" where "you could feel the joys and woes of long-­dead humans" — found expression in his novel.

Cloudstreet, the ramshackle Victorian-era house that gives the book its title, is a character in its own right, heaving and sighing, growing and shifting.

"The house in my book was alive," Winton writes.

An ancient culture

Much of Cloudstreet unfolds around Derbal Yerrigan, as it is known by its Noongar custodians, or the Swan River.

Winton hoped the river — "the abiding metaphor of the book" — might also serve as a metaphor to help drive reconciliation, an idea that was gaining momentum at the time.

For millennia, Noongar people have gathered on the river's banks.

It was a waterway also valued by Winton and his forebears. "We played there, hunted there, feasted there, danced and celebrated there," he writes.

But by the 80s, the river was ailing after decades of mismanagement under colonisation.

Winton, an ardent environmentalist, hosted the 2023 ABC TV documentary Ningaloo Nyinggulu, telling the story of a remarkable stretch of the West Australian coast. (Supplied)

The characters of Cloudstreet, products of the world around them, embody the disconnect between White Australia and the land's traditional owners.

"The sad thing is that the people in Cloudstreet don't always understand what's right in front of them," Winton says.

"I was keen to write about these white working-class people and to honour their lives and their hardships and their aspirations.

"But I couldn't make them any more enlightened than they were … They could see the river, but they didn't really understand what the river was, how sacred and how ancient it is in the same way that they couldn't really appreciate how sacred and ancient the land is.

"I couldn't give them contemporary opinions or attitudes because they didn't have them. They couldn't have them."

First published at ABC News, October 19, 2026

'Medieval women could make accusations': The true story of a 15th-Century sexual assault survivor's quest for justice

By Laurie Clarke

A 15th-Century panel depicts Justice as a crowned figure – the Jehanne case upends assumptions about how medieval society treated sexual assault survivors (Credit: Getty Images)

A new book offers a remarkable account of one woman's legal battle after suffering a brutal attack in 1472 in the French city of Dijon. It defies our modern assumptions about women's lives in the Middle Ages.

Jehanne was a relative stranger in the city of Dijon in the winter of 1472, when she was subject to an incident of horrific violence. She was heavily pregnant at the time.

 

What happened next, traced by historian Sara McDougall in her new book Justice for Jehanne, offers a surprising snapshot of medieval justice that upends widespread assumptions about the age. 

Warning: This article contains upsetting details of sexual assault. 

Based on records of an investigation into the assault, the book takes the form of a medieval detective story, teasing out: What really happened that night? And who was the woman at the centre of it? 

Who was Jehanne?

Born in Lorraine in northeastern France to a poor family, Jehanne had travelled south to Dijon. In this era, identity was a slippery thing. In 1472, she reported her age to the investigator as "about 32". Births were not marked, so no one could be quite sure of how old they were. She said she was married: the "wife of Jehan of Relanges". 

At that time, clothing above all dictated how someone should be treated, and Jehanne's would have demanded a measure of respect. Her clothing was elegant, according to witnesses. The long hood draped carefully over her golden tresses when out in public denoted her status as a respectable married woman.

Reign of terror

In Dijon these were violent, war-ravaged times. Fighting raged between Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and King Louis XI of France, and the city under imminent threat of invasion as the king advanced into the Burgundy countryside.

“There were recurrent problems of men at night looking for potential victims to extort or abuse or hold for ransom or abduct – Sara McDougall

To protect Dijon, the duke had stationed mercenaries around its walls. But these wild and lawless men had subjected the municipality to their own reign of terror. 

"There were recurrent problems of men at night looking for potential victims to extort or abuse or hold for ransom or abduct," McDougall tells the BBC. "The city authorities were not happy about it. This was a major point of conflict between the city and the duke." 

The crime

On the evening of 3 January 1472, Jehanne and her female host heard a heavy thump on the front door. They were faced with two local men who demanded the women come with them. After they refused, one of the men fled to a nearby inn to gather some of the Duke's mercenaries.  

According to Jehanne, the men dragged her to a nearby field and assaulted her. It didn't matter that she was pregnant, they shouted. They'd heard her unborn child was a priest's, and therefore illegitimate. 

The court of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy who, at this moment in history had stationed lawless
mercenaries around the walls of Dijon (Credit: Getty Images)

Jehanne described the men seeking "carnal company" with her, while she thrashed in the snow. They were ultimately prevented by her heavy pregnancy and intense struggle. She described being beaten and thrown on her stomach, and being terrified for the health of her unborn child. 

What happened next is surprising given our modern conception of the Middle Ages. 

It's commonly thought that rape and sexual assault were considered so shaming that female survivors were routinely treated as outcasts by their communities, and ultimately forced into sex work. This notion can be traced to a popular book called Medieval Prostitution (first published in 1988, and updated in 2010) by Jacques Rossiaud. 

McDougall, a history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, set out to fact-check Rossiaud's account, armed with a brief reference he made to an unnamed pregnant woman who was sexually assaulted by mercenaries in Dijon. The woman was at first too ashamed to share her ordeal with the authorities, Rossiaud wrote. And many sexual assault survivors like her purportedly ended up in brothels. 

A new book by Sara McDougall re-examines the assault and its aftermath, and uncovers new testimony about the case
(Credit: Blaise Dubrocq/ Princeton University Press)

The individual sounds a lot like Jehanne. But when McDougall started researching the case – pouring over 70 pages of densely inscribed parchment preserved in Dijon's municipal archive – a very different story emerged. 

A detailed investigation

The details of Jehanne's testimony were recorded by an investigator who worked on behalf of the city authorities, Jaques Borestel.  

Hearing reports that mercenaries had abducted and assaulted a pregnant woman, Borestel had set out immediately to gather details about the victim and suspected perpetrators. 

His first interview with Jehanne took place the day after the attack. He found her lying in bed, stricken from her ordeal and fearful for her baby. She readily supplied Borestel with details of the attack and as much information about the assailants as she could recall. The next day, Jehanne gave birth to a baby girl. 

“The penalty for abduction and assault was technically death – but most crimes weren't prosecuted

Jehanne's decision to share her story was a little unusual. There were plenty of deterrents for such honesty. 

The city hardly had a gleaming record on criminal justice. The penalty for abduction and assault was technically death. But most crimes weren't prosecuted. In short, Jehanne didn't have much to gain by making her complaint.

With the information supplied by Jehanne, Borestel was able to quickly round up most of the attackers.

After interrogation, the men denied assaulting Jehanne. Borestel arranged a meeting where Jehanne faced her attackers and repeated her version of events. When they still didn't confess, municipal officials agreed that it was acceptable to take "extraordinary" measures. One man was tortured using a method similar to waterboarding. Eventually, all confessed. 

Armed with confessions, the city decided on the appropriate punishment: death. But there was a problem. As mercenaries, the men were technically under the purview of the duke. The duke had recently issued a statement condemning the mercenaries' behaviour, and claiming that he wanted Dijon's residents to feel safe. Now he had an opportunity to publicly punish wrongdoing. Would he take it? 

Investigating the plaintiff

A short while later, the municipal officials received word from the ducal authorities. They recommended the men walk free. The municipality pushed back, attempting to buy themselves time. In the interim, they commissioned a new investigation: into Jehanne herself. They didn't intend to put Jehanne on trial, but they wanted to assess her legitimacy as a plaintiff. As Borestel wrote in no uncertain terms, he would investigate whether she was a "preudefemme" (respectably married) or a "loose woman". 

Borestel interviewed neighbours and others who might have information on Jehanne. Many said that she appeared to be a respectable woman – no one shamed or blamed her for suffering the assault. But details contradicting the story she had told Borestel soon came to light. 

One neighbour said Jehanne gave birth to another child, two years prior, in a nearby monastery. The father was thought to be a priest with whom Jehanne shared a room at the time. It seemed Jehanne hadn't seen her husband for a number of years.

“Despite the looming threat of reprisals, neighbours and acquaintances had helped Jehanne find places to hide out

Borestel met with Jehanne again to confront her with this latest evidence. Since he'd last spoken to her,

she'd been threatened by defenders of the mercenaries. Despite the looming threat of reprisals,

neighbours and acquaintances had helped her find places to hide out. She'd eventually landed at a hospital, where she was working. 

 

Jehanne admitted to Jaques that she had previously uttered a few untruths. She acknowledged that her husband had left her several years ago to fight in the war. 

After that, she met a priest and became his mistress, bearing two of his children.

So, did this make Jehanne a "loose woman" after all? In her own summation, as recorded by Borestel: "It was better to be loose with her body to make her living than resort to stealing from people." 

A new perspective 

This aligned with the complicated sexual morality of the times. Sex before marriage was supposedly forbidden but in practice was widely permitted. Priests were supposed to be celibate, but had mistresses and sired illegitimate children. 

Prostitution was supposedly a grave moral sin, but was widely tolerated.   

Jehanne was not who she said she was – not the prim wife that she had initially depicted herself as. She was, it turns out, "living in sin". But the interesting thing was that it didn't matter. 

Prosecutors, even after hearing Borestel's latest evidence, decided to continue pursuing her case. The fact she had borne the illegitimate offspring of a priest turned out to be immaterial. The officials wanted those mercenaries dead. 

However, there was another problem. The mercenaries were no longer in prison. 

The ducal authorities had claimed the men were members of the clergy, and therefore subject only to clerical laws. Although patently absurd – clergy were forbidden from bearing weapons – the municipal authorities' hands were tied. After two months in prison, the men walked free.

“This medieval society did not engage in victim blaming and shaming to any extent that I can find – Sara McDougall

It becomes impossible to track what happened to Jehanne next. Did she become a prostitute? It's possible – there are some Jehannes in Dijon around this time who did. But the records are too fragmentary to say with any certainty.

Regardless of where her tale ended, McDougall relished the opportunity to get to know the small sliver of this Jehanne, preserved in a sheaf of 600-year-old court documents. "I have great admiration for her. I'm so struck by the ways in which she continued to stand up for herself." Despite the inhospitable times, "she saw herself as having agency and choices." 

Even more importantly, Jehanne's story challenges assumptions about the Middle Ages. "This medieval society did not engage in victim blaming and shaming to any extent that I can find," says McDougall. "Women could make accusations. They didn't have to have perfect recall, and they didn't have to be perfect virgins." Even after Jehanne made her complaint, neighbours rallied to her aid. 

Life was indisputably punishing for medieval women, and some survivors were no doubt treated poorly. But this Jehanne was able to report a crime, be taken seriously, find friendship during the ordeal, and achieve a small measure of justice. Whatever she did next, she could at least carry that with her.

First published at BBC, October 19, 2026