"Live at Yoshi's," recorded over three days in 1998 at the noted northern California showcase for jazz, offers more evidence of a truth made plain on Dee Dee Bridgewater's acclaimed back-to-back tributes to Horace Silver and Ella Fitzgerald: The Memphis-born singer, based in France since the '80s, easily reaffirms her rep as a true inheritor of the tradition defined by such fallen idols as Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Betty Carter.

Buoyed by the skilled support of pianist-organist Thierry Eliez, drummer Ali Jackson and bassist Thomas Bramerie, Bridgewater sings like she's on a mission and/or scats with abandon on the likes of "Slow Boat to China," "Stairway to the Stars," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Midnight Sun" and a sprinting "Cherokee."

Bridgewater's personable stage chatter, sultry come-ons in English and French and riffs borrowed from Herbie Hancock tunes "Chameleon" and "Watermelon Man" color a carefully measured, 14-minute version of "Love For Sale." And she gives props to Soul Brother No. 1 with an exuberant, if brief, work-out on "Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine." It's a bracing sonic postcard that makes a listener wish he'd been there. This feels like the next best thing.
- PHILIP BOOTH