Rickie Lee Jones: The Evening of My Best Day

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * *)


It's been over six years since her last album of original material - the critical stinker Ghostyhead with elements of boho hip-hop - but Jones says she was prompted to get back in the game by the election of George W. Bush and the passage of the Patriot Act which has effectively curtailed hard-won democratic rights.

Artists with little history of politicised writing who feel they have something of great importance to say - "I realised someone had to speak up," says Jones - are to be treated with some suspicion. They often present leaden polemics and sloganeering in the guise of an artistic statement. And with her little-girl voice, Jones has her work cut out more than most.

But - thanks to the presence of a great band which includes guitarist-without-portfolio Bill Frisell, friends Grant Lee Phillips and Ben Harper, organist Neil Larson and a squad of sharp LA session types - this polished and jazzy affair has musical touchstones in funk-lite, folk, blues and her own beat-styled poetics.

The music woos you while the words, some so typically slurry they require careful attention, poke at Bush (the opener Ugly Man asks "What's your plan?"), the whole Washington DC cabal and big money from oil companies on the seductive Memphis soul of Little Mysteries, and the Patriot Act specifically on Tell Somebody (To Repeal the Patriot Act), which is as lyrically simplistic and whining as the title suggests.

Jones may not be as powerful at this political stuff as, say, Buffy Sainte-Marie, but here she makes her points while soaking it in balms of distinctive instrumentations and arrangements which are enticing and point a way for her return to the frontline of music if not right there on the barricade.

Label: V2