Gig review: Rickie Lee Jones

Published on Wednesday 9 June 2010 10:01

RICKIE LEE JONES **** QUEEN'S HALL, EDINBURGH

NO MATTER how cheerful or romantic their lyrical content, there is a certain sadness to Rickie Lee Jones's songs. It's hard to place where this comes from, but perhaps it's down to her laid-back, somewhat doleful performance manner. While the Chicagoan has maintained a clearly loving fanbase over the years, her live presence is decidedly unstarry.

This makes it all the more striking, then, when she does actually let rip with a song. Her playing, together with that of multi-instrumentalist Lionel Cole and bassist Jose Maramba, is blessed with a mesmerising, intuitive resonance that is borderline spectacular in places. The lengthy Living It Up was the centrepiece of the show, and it saw the trio almost play musical chairs throughout, with Jones moving from piano to drums, Cole from drums to keyboard and Maramba sawing away at his bass with a bow. Fusing rhythm and blues with jazz, it was one of those rare live moments which deserves the term electrifying.

Otherwise, Jones's singular voice carried the occasion, a high-pitched and hopeful holler which sounds fragile to the point of breaking at any moment. She sang in praise of her daughter on Wild Girl ("if I can't give her advice, at least I can give her a song"), in tribute to her father with The Moon is Made of Gold, a song he wrote, and of beautiful, pained romance and nostalgia on Bonfires and On Saturday Afternoons in 1963, respectively.

The closing Chuck E's in Love naturally earned much applause, but her biggest hit still didn't steal this memorable show.