'The jazz side of life' - Rickie Lee Jones comes to Leamington
SHE describes her early life as being bonded by a "mystical chaos" and is known for her free-spirited approach to life and music, and Rickie Lee Jones says fans should not expect to her live set to sound like her records.
The singer will be performing at Leamington Assembly on Monday July 5 as part of a short tour of small venues to promote her 2009 album Balm in Gilead, a collection of songs written over the past 20 years.
After experimenting with sampling, loops and minimal arrangements, in the past decade Jones has returned to more traditional but still wide-ranging sounds, but says fans cannot expect the familiar.
She said: "I improvise most of the show, all of the song, so the care of the arrangements does not take place in the same way as the record.
We love making it a living thing - the song and the concert, made of the spirit of the people who are there. They steer us, and depending on who is on the stage, more or less of this goes on."
Jones doesn't like telephones, so this interview is conducted by email. When the answers arrive they read more like beat verse of Allen Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti. In some ways she seems to come from another age, one that makes struggle and difficulty seem glamorous.
Jones was born in Chicago to a family she describes as being "bonded by some mystical chaos". Her grandfather was a vaudeville performer who went under the name Peg Leg Jones after losing a leg playing by the railway tracks as a boy. Her father Richard was a runaway and rode the railways as a boy. He met his wife Betty, who had grown up in an orphanage, at a soda fountain and later took his family to Arizona, where he had first travelled aged 14.
Much of Jones' childhood was spent there, moving to a different house almost every year, but she took ballet, tap dancing, acting and swimming lessons. A singer himself, he wrote The Moon is Made of Gold, a song she has revisited on Balm in Gilead.
She said: "It was always there. He wrote and sang, played trumpet, he acted. It was just part of what was going on. I always sang. My earliest memories of making up songs, also hearing my father sing to me, and listening to the radio, it is just always part of me."
Jones ran away from home in 1970 to join the hippy scene, hitchhiking along Highway 1, and later moved in with her big sister. She moved to California, where she worked as a waitress, barmaid and secretary, went to college, and began performing aged 21. After gaining the attention of musicians such as Lowell George, she had her first hit with Chuck E.'s in Love in 1979.
It's tempting to believe the days of free spirits comng and going are gone, but Jones thinks not. She said: "There are families drifting about and bonded by some mystical chaos. I can still drift and imagine and linger in long sultry days, I suppose.
"But the Phoenix I knew is gone, and the world we live in no longer innocent. Children still are innocent. If we protect them, they can still have some part of innocence that makes fields and birds and twilight mystical and full of music. I mean I was out in the fields singing songs at the top of my lungs.
"I still see little girls like that, dancing, singing to themselves. I pass them in an airport or a mall. It's a state of being; people who live inside."
Jones is sometimes compared to Tom Waits, and the pair were a couple in the early 1980s, when she was once quoted as saying the two of them were on 'the jazz side of life'. As the 1980s went on she recorded jazz standards, then in the 1990s experimented with pop standards and then with with samples and electronic music.
During these years, fame ebbed away, but Jones does not believe this made it easier to pursue unusual projects.
She said: "Being out of the limelight makes it easier to experiment only if what you are after is not music. If you are only interested in your music, I think it does not matter what light you stand in.
"If you have other interests, if your concert or recording are not just of and for themselves, but serve another interest like, say, money, or eternal glory, or some such thing, then you might have second thoughts before you abandon the form of young blood and try some new one altogether."
Among the current generation, Jones cites harp player and singer Joanna Newsom and singer Cat Power as musicians she likes. She added: "There are really new things going on too, honest, not tricks, no gimmicks, yet powerfully creative. But damned if i can think of any."
Tickets cost 22.50. Call 523001 or book online.
www.leamingtonassembly.com
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Tuesday 22 May 2012
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