RICKIE LEE JONES
Duchess of Coolsville: An Anthology
Rhino
Records
Read
"Jazz Music's Singer/Songwriter Movement" here
at Jazzitude
One really great thing that can happen to
an artist is to outlive some kind of ‘overnight success’
and to have the public at large turn their attention elsewhere,
toward a new flavor, while a core audience that is devoted
to the artists’ continual growth and search for new
forms of expression remains large enough to afford the artist
the ability to record on a regular basis and plenty of live
performance opportunities to both nurture and grow the core
audience. When these optimal conditions are met, you have
an artist with plenty of room to grow and stretch at his
or her own pace, an audience whose wildest musical dreams
are met, and a steadily growing body of work that belies
the mainstream public’s belief that the artist in
question is some kind of ‘has been.’
These optimal conditions have largely been
met for Rickie Lee Jones, one of the very best popular music
songwriters of the past twenty years or so and one of its
more individualistic and interesting performers as well.
To many, Jones flared briefly with the release of her eponymous
debut album featuring the hit single “Chuck E.’s
in Love.” Her followup, Pirates, is generally considered
one of (if not the) best albums of her career (all but two
of the album’s tracks are included here). It didn’t
have a hit of the type of “Chuck E,” though.
Jones scored another hit with her version of “Don’t
Walk Away Renee,” but most of the record-buying public
is probably unaware that Jones has continued to record,
with the occasional brief hiatus, right up until the present
day. She’s released a few albums of eclectic pop music
cover versions, but most releases have featured Jones’
original songs.
A great deal was originally made of Jones’
relation to (and relationships with) L.A. hipster Chuck
E. Weiss and neo-beat-boho poet Tom Waits, fellow travelers
with Jones in the realm of coolsville. It’s true that
there are common roots between the three—the influence
of the Beat poets, a love of the lurid and the down-and-out,
a certain sense of tragic romanticism. Weiss tends to work
the more jump blues, roadhouse side of the equation, while
Waits has moved from hipster angel to freewheeling ringmaster
of an avant garde sonic soundscape. Jones, though, has stayed
closest to doing what she always really did do. She’s
always been a songwriter at heart, and her affinity for
the craft of songwriting explains her deeply personal cover
albums. And so we move easily between the stylistic differences
engendered by mingling different periods of her discography.
Those who are not familiar with Jones’
more recent work will get a big dose of it initially, with
the opening four tracks coming from the albums The Evening
of My Best Day (2003) and Traffic From Paradise (1993).
It may seem odd including an album made 10 years ago among
an artists more recent, but that was already fourteen years
into Jones’ recorded career. The songs demonstrate
both how melodic a writer Jones is and how well she can
move among stylistic vernaculars, from the deep ballad “A
Tree on Allenford” and the ponderous “Altar
Boy” to the folksy “Beat Angels” and the
soft samba of “Bitchenostrophy.”
Jones has always been clearly influenced by
jazz music and by a jazz aesthetic as well. Like Joni Mitchell,
Jones is a fearless investigator of musical styles, but
unlike Mitchell, she
often tries to work her inspiration into a
more or less conventionally structured song form. Rickie
Lee’s songs connect so well because they could be
performed in any number of styles and stand perfectly well
on their own, for the most part, as songs. The additional
element that Jones brings to the mix is in her choice of
styles, production, and collaborators, which is true of
any musician who is not merely good, but rather great, at
what they do. Following her first two albums, both co-produced
by Russ Titelman, Jones has produced or co-produced all
subsequent albums with a variety of collaborators who represent
attempts to delve into different aspects of her artistic
vision: James Newton Howard, Walter Becker, David Was, Rick
Boston. Her musical collaborators on these recordings is
no less spectacular: Steve Gadd, Willy Weeks, Buzz Feiten,
Victor Feldman, Steve Lukather, Chuck Rainey, Tom Scott,
David Sanborn, Walter Becker, Robben Ford, Joe Henderson,
Leo Kottke, David Hidalgo, Alex Acuna, Syd Straw, John Pizarelli.
Her music is not jazz, but it would not exist if she did
not listen to and enjoy jazz as well as many other forms
of music. In this respect, Jones is one of the spiritual
ancestors of the newer breed of singer/songwriters like
Norah Jones or Patricia Barber.
The incredible variety of sounds and marvelous
songs continues through the first two discs: “Coolsville,
“”Firewalker,” “Ghost Train,”
“It Must Be Love,” “Magazine,” “On
Saturday Afternoon in 1963,” “Pirates,”
“Satellites,” “Skeletons,” “Stewart’s
Coat,” “The Last Chance Texaco,” “Tigers,”
“We Belong Together,” “Weasel and the
White Boys Cool,” and “Woody and Dutch on the
Slow Train to Peking.” And there are additional, sometimes
less familiar, pleasures here as well.
The third CD in Duchess of Coolsville documents
Rickie Lee’s many guest appearances on other artists’
recordings as well as some live performances and a few demo
versions. It is not completely essential material, but much
of it is fun and gives insight into Jones’ ability
to collaborate with a varied goup of performers, sometimes
in a live setting. Her version of Donovan’s “Sunshine
Superman” from the Party of Five soundtrack is a little
too laid back, but still worth hearing. “Makin’
Whoopee” comes from Dr. John’s In a Sentimental
Mood album, and is again a fun collaboration, if not a terribly
surprising one. “Autumn Leaves” comes from bassist
Rob Wasserman’s Duets CD (now packaged as a box with
Solo and Trios). It’s a typically idiosyncratic take
on the song, and one has to wonder whether, had she become
a jazz chanteuse, Jones would have occupied a space somewhere
between Blossom Dearie and Shirley Horn. A live version
of “Atlas’ Marker” performed with guitarist
Bill Frisell is remarkably interesting and demonstrates
how well Frisell works as an accompanist. Glasgow pop trio
The Blue Nile perform their own “Easter Parade”
with Jones perfectly. Jones frequently cites the band and
its lead singer/songwriter Paul Buchanan as an influence,
and those interested in smart, atmospheric, dreamy pop music
a la Talk Talk or the Waterboys would do well to check them
out. Three live tracks show Jones indulging her jazz singer
muse. “My Funny Valentine” is originally from
the Girl at Her Volcano recording, while its successor,
a live version of June Christy’s signature song, “Something
Cool” was only included on the cassette release of
that record. Both are workmanlike readings of the song,
neither breaking new ground or outstripping the many versions
already on record. But it is nice to hear Jones acknowledging
her influences in this way. “The Evening of My Best
Day,” performed with only piano backing, isn’t
a jazz song at all, but it demonstrates clearly the emotional
and technical ability that Rickie Lee can bring to bear
on a song.
The remaining tracks are demos, mostly of interest to completists
and students of songwriting and recording. It is laudable
of Jones (and/or her record company) to include this third
disc of material rather than attempt a “Rarities”
type of disc later on.
Duchess of Coolsville is a nice collection
of music to have for longtime fans of Jones and particularly
for those who did not follow her career past the first couple
of albums. The sequencing of tracks guarantees that one
will never get bored, and the presentation of such a solid
body of work in one package shows clearly that Jones belongs
in the pantheon of great American female singers and songwriters
that includes luminaries like Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro,
and Carole King. Jazz fans and pop fans will find plenty
to like in her music, and this collection makes a broad
cross-section of her career available to interested listeners.
