Rickie Lee Jones to perform at Berkshire Music Hall

Print Story | Email Story
Rickie Lee Jones
Pittsfield - Rickie Lee Jones is one of the most expressive voices on the popular music landscape. Revealing a highly nuanced understanding of American culture, her daring vocal style and expert musicianship is matched by her acutely observed lyrics. On Thursday July 28, she’ll bring her band to the Berkshire Music Hall for a special intimate concert to benefit the newly formed Westenhook Arts. The Los Angeles Times had this to say about her live performance: “Even when an audience is eager to be mesmerized, few singer-songwriters can weave a spell like the one Rickie Lee Jones cast. The veteran boho-jazz-pop artist molded time and space at whim, relaying human pain, comedy and bliss with the authority of someone who has witnessed it all, and the deceptive ease of a vocalist in full command of her singular instrument.” By the time she nineteen, Jones was living in Los Angeles, waiting tables and occasionally playing music in out of the way coffee houses and bars. All the while, she was developing her unique aesthetic: music that was sometimes spoken, often beautifully sung, and while emotionally accessible, she was writing lyrics as taut and complex as any by the great American poet, Elizabeth Bishop. In her voice and songs, we saw smoky stocking seams, love being everything but requited. And it was during these years that Jones’ song, “Easy Money,” caught the attention of one musician and then the music industry. The song was recorded by Lowell George, the founder of the band, Little Feat. He used it on his solo album, “Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here.” Warner Brothers auditioned Jones and quickly signed her to the label. Her debut on Warners, Rickie Lee Jones, released in 1979, won the Grammy for Best New Artist. She was hailed by one critic as a “highly touted new pop-jazz-singer-songwriter” and another critic as “one of the best--if not the best--artist of her generation.” In addition to the album’s brilliant songs--including the exceptional “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963,” the haunting “Last Chance Texaco,” and the popular “Chuck E’s in Love”--Jones was becoming a figure whose life was bearing a great deal of emulation by young women and men who found, in her deep and personal and idiosyncratic life and work, a model for the new generation of hipster: She was heralded as a trendsetter in dress (beret, subdresses, heels) and in lifestyle, given her by then famous relationship with two boys she helped to make famous, too: Chuck E. Weiss, a Los Angeles character, and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits, about whom Rickie has said: "We walk around the same streets, and I guess it's primarily a jazz-motivated situation for both of us. We're living on the jazz side of life." Two years after the release of Rickie Lee Jones, Pirates (Warners) appeared. It was even darker, and deeper, and richer than the first album, and included the haunting “We Belong Together,” and “A Lucky Guy,” which Jones has said grew out of her life with Waits. The brilliant characterizations she builds in the lyrics for “Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking,” and “Traces of the Western Slope,” are amplified by her voice, which, at times, has the lonesome sound of a train whistle on a wind swept prairie and, at other times, sounds like nothing so much as laughter winding down into a whisper, or a sigh. The album confounded expectations. Jones was fast becoming a poet of the disenfranchised who eschewed any purely commercial considerations when it came to making a song. Ironically, Jones has always had a strong and solid fan base that has always purchased the album Rickie Lee Jones means them to have. On Pirates--indeed, all her albums--one has to listen to what Jones has to say, which is not a hallmark of most popular music. She has always been different because she conveys meaning not solely through her well-crafted songs, but through pure sound as well. In this way, she anticipated such innovative contemporary artists as Tricky and his primary vocalist, Martina, who riff on the texture of the singer’s voice. Jones’ vocal work also hearkens back to the great singer-song stylists of an earlier generation, ranging from Billie Holiday to Laura Nyro who were intent on making us absorb reality from their lived point of view. In 1983, Jones released her mini-LP, Girl at Her Volcano (Warners). The title was inspired by Malcolm Lowry’s brilliant autobiographical novel, Under the Volcano. The album was a rich selection of pop standards (the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee”) and jazz standards (Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life”). The album is emotionally risky, a walk in a mysterious emotional terrain that is alternately joyous and melancholy, peppy and spirited. Indeed, these are all the qualities that one finds again and again on Rickie’s next two albums, which again defied the music industry’s expectations: 1984’s luminous The Magazine (Warners) and 1989’s Flying Cowboys (Geffen). On The Magazine (which includes the revolutionary “Rorschachs: Theme for the Pope,” which predates her innovative work on her 1997 masterpiece, Ghostyhead), Rickie Lee Jones reached the apotheosis of her art--until then. Raw and sophisticated, the album is best viewed as a suite, one which begins punctuated by a journey. On The Magazine, girls walk down to Alphabet City in Manhattan to hang and talk with the street people she is separate from and not separate from and identifies with. On The Magazine, Jones is as much inside the scene as she is reporting on it. It is the penultimate album about urban alienation, and the poeticism inherent in going your own way. Flying Cowboys, on the other hand, is the work of what initially seems like an entirely different person. On it, Jones has become wedded to the world. She is not as isolated as she’s been before. Prior to the album’s release, Jones married the French musician Pascal Nabet-Meyer, whom she met while on holiday in Tahiti (they have subsequently divorced). She also gave birth to her child, Charlotte Rose, for whom Jones wrote the moving “The Horses,” just as Richard Loris Jones had written “The Moon is Made of Gold,” for his daughter years and years before. A sold-out world tour followed the release of Flying Cowboys. And in becoming the artist she meant to become--one who was rich in the history of show business lore, the bright lights and dark hearts of the carny world, hitting the road and not looking back--Jones paid homage to the tradition she had grown out of when she released POP POP, her long-awaited jazz album, in 1991. As Jones has written of it, the album was “a completely different treatment of jazz tunes than the usual piano, bass and drum setup,” in other words, Jones was reinventing the sound of the jazz standard by de-standardizing it, and finding the emotional core at the heart of frequently heard songs, such as her definitive cover of “My Funny Valentine,” and the hilarious and heartbreaking “Hi-Lily, Hi-Lo,” which sounds like a direct commentary on an old form: French bal musique. Like any writer, any artist, Jones evolves, personally and artistically; one works in tandem with the other. 1993’s Traffic from Paradise (Geffen) was produced, mixed and recorded by an all-female crew and has the energy less of a committed feminist than a woman who has grown comfortable in her skin, and who once said that her vulnerability as an artist, and as a woman, made convention seem like the least of her problems. And it is that nakedness--almost unbearable at times, in fact--that characterizes 1995’s Naked Songs (Reprise), perhaps the best live album ever made due to its extraordinary intimacy: you can hear the audience hanging on every note. Recorded over two nights at the Filmore in San Francisco, the album is comprised entirely of Jones penned-tunes, including astounding renditions of “The Magazine,” and “Last Chance Texaco.” The album is less a retrospective than a reckoning, of sorts: a perfect melding of past and present. The accretion of experience on Naked Songs, vulnerabilizes the listener, just as Jones’ most recent release, Ghostyhead (1997) is an amalgamation of her skills as a songwriter, song stylist, and engineer of sound. Rickie Lee Jones will be performing at the Berkshire Music Hall in support of her new 3 CD collection Duchess of Coolsville- An Anthology, to be released June 28 on Rhino Records. Reserved seating tickets for An Evening with Rickie Lee Jones are $40 and $45 and go on sale Thursday June 16. Tickets are available online at www.westenhook.org and can also be charged by phone by calling 800.594.TIXX (8499).
Share
If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.

Senior Golf Series Returns in September

Community submission
PITTSFIELD, Mass. -- The Berkshire County Fall Senior Golf series returns in September with events on five consecutive Wednesdays starting Sept. 18.
 
It is the 22nd year of the series, which is a fund-raiser for junior golf in the county, and it is open to players aged 50 and up.
 
The series will feature two divisions for each event based on the combined ages of the playing partners.
 
Golfers play from the white tees (or equivalent) with participants 70 and over or who have a handicap of more than 9 able to play from the forward tees.
 
Gross and net prices will be available in each division.
 
The cost is $55 per event and includes a round of golf, food and prizes. Carts are available for an additional fee.
 
Golfers should call the pro shop at the course for that week's event no sooner than two weeks before the event to register.
 
View Full Story

More Stories

Sports
image description

Big Second Half Lifts Hoosac Girls to Another State Title

Sports
Sports
image description

The Hunt for Red March: Hoosac Valley Girls, Boys Go for State...

Sports
Sports
image description

Kotek, Dupuis Win Individual State Titles

Sports
Sports
image description

Lee Bowlers Win State Championship

Sports
Sports
image description

McGovern Scores 1,000th as Hurricanes Advance

Sports
Sports
image description

Pittsfield's Mullen Takes Two Titles at State Alpine Meet

Sports
Latest Stories
Previous Next

What's Trending?