The Seattle Times
Friday, August 17, 2001

Concert Review
Rickie Lee Jones leads a tour through career
By Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic

No opening act, no intermission. At Woodland Park Zoo on Wednesday, Rickie Lee Jones simply took the stage with her four-man band and spent the next 90 minutes or so ambling through her extensive repertoire. If you sat near enough to actually hear Jones well, you got a satisfying tour through the unique 20-year odyssey of this singer-songwriter. Wearing baggy pants, a loose green shirt and her signature beret, Jones (who just moved to Los Angeles, after living in Tacoma for several years), seemed to be putting her set together on the spot as the mood struck. Rickie Lee Jones
At Zoo Tunes, Woodland Park Zoo, Wednesday night.


"We've been off the road for a couple months," she told the sun-drenched crowd at one point. "Let's see if we still remember the chord changes to this one." But if Jones' remarks and attire were casual, her music was as carefully crafted, personal and vividly imagistic as ever: a collage of breathy phrasings, piercing siren cries, jazzy whooping and nasal tenderness. Now in her mid-40s, Jones still performs some of the jazz-and-pop-inflected songs of misfit youth that landed her on the charts — songs that had critics likening her to Jack Kerouac and Betty Carter, Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell (minus the latter's high-priestess pretensions). It was a pleasure to hear Jones run through her 1979 breakthrough hit, the jaunty hipster's love call, "Chuck E's in Love," and revisit her indigo-blue ode, "Coolsville," and all those impressionistic story-songs evoking "sad-eyed Sinatras" and " '57 Lincolns," lonely Texaco stations and adolescent revolt. ("Got your mother in a whirl/'Cause she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl.") But Jones' set also reflected other turns her quirkily independent career has taken since she ditched Olympia (where she spent part of her youth) for L.A.'s neo-beatnik scene. With acoustic bassist Paul Nowinski, Jones offered idiosyncratic takes on standards — "Summertime," "My Funny Valentine," and a boppy "On the Street Where You Live" (from her recent album, "It's Like This"). She also sang the brooding "Ghosty Head," the title tune off the spacey, synth-looped album which confounded some fans, and "The Moon Is Made of Gold" (a touching lullaby penned by her dad). Smiling broadly and often, Jones was in cheerful spirits, despite pesky sound problems that never quite got resolved. If she's no longer the gamine vagabond of yore, but now herself the mother of a 13-year-old, Jones can reflect back on her own wild, battered innocence as a wise survivor who's stubbornly stuck to her own musical path. The Zoo Tunes series (which ends its season soon with sold-out concerts by Nanci Griffith and John Prine) is becoming more and more a big family picnic scene, with lots of small children — and lots of noise and commotion, making it tough to tune into the music. Maybe organizers should rethink the logistics and tone of this series. Letting children in free to lengthy concerts by sophisticated pop-folkies is generous but doesn't make for easy listening.