Rickie Lee Jones

Born in Chicago in 1954 and after a spell in Phoenix settling in California, Rickie Lee Jones emerged in the late 1970s on the Venice club scene in Los Angeles, where she performed a repertoire blending traditional jazz and her own compositions. She made an immediate impact with songwriting that crosses rock, pop, folk, rhythm and blues, soul and jazz, carried by a supple voice and a highly narrative phrasing. Her debut album, Rickie Lee Jones, was released in 1979, followed by Pirates in 1981 — two records that established an urban, literary and musically fluid universe. Over the years she broadened her approach with The Magazine (1984), Flying Cowboys (1989, produced with Walter Becker), then Pop Pop (1991), Traffic from Paradise (1993) and Ghostyhead (1997), where her writing met more electronic textures bordering on trip hop. She subsequently alternated original songs, reinterpretations and more acoustic or jazz-oriented projects such as It’s Like This (2000), The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard (2007), Balm in Gilead (2009), The Other Side of Desire (2015), Kicks (2019) and Pieces of Treasure (2023). Her trajectory also includes collaborations with Dr. John, Lyle Lovett, Rob Wasserman and Tom Waits, and has remained open to changes of form and register.