Dee Dee Bridgewater is one of the most decorated and versatile artists in the history of jazz and American music. Her career spans more than five decades, crossing freely between jazz, Broadway, theater, and the blues tradition with a voice and a stage presence that are among the most immediately commanding in any genre she inhabits. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Flint, Michigan, she grew up surrounded by jazz, the daughter of a musician father, and came to New York in the early 1970s where she quickly established herself as one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation. She performed with the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, toured with Dizzy Gillespie, and originated the role of Glinda the Good Witch in the original Broadway production of “The Wiz” in 1974, winning the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. That combination of jazz credibility and Broadway achievement defined her early career, and everything that came after expanded it.

The Grammy Awards came later and told the rest of the story: Best Jazz Vocal Album for “Dear Ella” in 1997, a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald that critics called the finest vocal jazz tribute recording in years; for “This Is New” in 2002; and for “Eleanora Fagan (1915–1959): To Billie with Love from Dee Dee” in 2010, an equally definitive tribute to Billie Holiday. Three Grammy wins for three tribute albums, each one demonstrating a different dimension of what she can do with a song and a story. In between those recordings she also served as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Goodwill Ambassador, spending years in West Africa and bringing back the musical influences that gave her later recordings their distinctive character. She is not simply a jazz singer. She is one of the great theatrical and musical figures of her era.

On this Australian tour, Bridgewater is performing alongside the We Exist! quintet, a multi-generational, all-female ensemble whose name announces its purpose directly. The We Exist! project is Bridgewater’s most explicitly statement-making touring vehicle, an ensemble built to showcase the depth of female musicianship in jazz at a moment when the conversation about representation in the music has reached a level of seriousness that the industry can no longer ignore. Performing with a quintet of women across a range of generations, from seasoned veterans to emerging voices, Bridgewater is making an argument through performance rather than through words: that the tradition of jazz has always included women, that it has always been shaped by women, and that the current generation of female jazz musicians is among the most accomplished in the music’s history. The We Exist! project puts that argument in front of audiences in every city it reaches.

Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Australian tour is exactly the kind of live jazz event that The Improv Café has always been built to celebrate and to broadcast. A vocalist of her stature, performing with an ensemble that makes a specific and meaningful statement about the tradition she inhabits, in festival settings that treat jazz as a serious art form and a living cultural event rather than a historical curiosity, is everything that live jazz can be when it is taken seriously at every level. The Melbourne cancellation is a genuine loss for that city’s audiences. The Perth performance on October 27 is the remaining opportunity to see one of the great voices in jazz history on this particular tour, in this particular configuration, before it concludes.

If you are in Western Australia, the Octagon Theatre in Perth on October 27 is the destination. Tickets through the Perth International Jazz Festival.