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.These performances became the paradoxi-cally safe space to work without a net and to risk venturinginto the most delicately sensitive or the most brutally emotivedepths of song.He was in many ways “like a jazz arranger”in his ability to “develop each idea, each composition slowly,building it, arranging and re-arranging it, assessing, experi-menting, delaying, enjoying, changing.” He was summoningall of his creative energies and philosophical approaches tomusicianship, drawing from his passion for Qawwali, hispast guitar training and interest in fusion and prog, and hisdevotional interest in the work of hallmark jazz composersand trying to find a way to channel all of those influencesin to his own aesthetic.On more than one occasion, Jeffexpressed his love for “listening to arrangements of things,anything from Duke Ellington to Edith Piaf, the small or-chestra with the singer.” During this period of experimentand adventure, then, Jeff Buckley sought to create a smallorchestra unto himself as he foraged through the classics inorder to sharpen his own musical goals and intentions.39Nowhere was this sense of experimentation and abandonmore apparent than in his cover of “Strange Fruit,” a songfirst performed by Billie Holiday in 1939 at New York’sbohemian, socially-conscious CafeŚociety.40 Jeff’s performance of this American protest song illuminates the extentto which he showed signs of his gift as an arranger and as a• 50 •GRACEthoughtful interpreter of unconventional popular music forme.Through “Strange Fruit” he pursued covering materialin a way that reverentially rearranged songs in order to un-cover the contours of their meaning.With a volume pedalor knob creating a nervous vibrato that recalls Holiday’shigh brassy vocals, his instrumentation pays homage to thebrilliance of Holiday’s trademark singing aesthetic.At thesame time, by changing pick-ups on his guitar and by playingtrills and oblique bends at key moments in Lewis Allen’santi-lynching ballad, Buckley pulls out the nervous tensionthat simmers just beneath the surface of Holiday’s elegantoriginal version of the song.In fact, his cover of “StrangeFruit” could change keys and tempos on any given night,sometimes within one night at multiple gigs.41 An impas-sioned wail and break mid-chorus in one version could turnin another into a mournful rendition of the “Summertime”melody.Buckley’s version(s) of “Strange Fruit” conjoins thehorrors of the rural 1930s South with the operatic grandeurof 1930s Gershwin, forcing listeners to question where oneform of violence ends and the other begins.In short, theintuitive brilliance of such reworkings ultimately intensifiedthe power of the original song.His interpretation of “Strange Fruit” is no doubt one ofthe best examples of how Jeff Buckley found “the insight ofa cover song in its differences from, rather than its similaritiesto, the original.” Critic Steve Tignor would liken this per-formative gift to a spacious, Pacific coast aesthetic ratherthan to the romantic hurly-burly energy of New York lifethat Jeff had, at that point, come to love.“He sings,” Tignordeclared in a 1994 piece published on the eve of Grace’srelease, in “a similar space-wrought Cali-soul, forsakingrhythm and stretching songs to their tortured limits with hisvocals.” Whether it was his transient California past or his• 51 •DAPHNE A.BROOKSlongtime interest in the intricate and elongated musical struc-tures of Genesis, Yes, and Rush or the fusion guitar experi-mentalism of Pat Metheney, Jeff Buckley’s evolving soundin those small venue days registered his passion to exploreas a performer.For this reason, friends and critics alike haveoften compared him to the most adventurous jazz musicianswho run “through every approach to phrase,” turning coremusical structures over and inside out in order to approachmaterial at “different angles, wringing vocal possibilities fromeach song.” Buckley, himself, recognized how “song inter-pretation is an art that’s so vulnerable you have to defend itin order to carry it with you.It’s gut-wrenching and heart-breaking to be somebody who has to get into something sodeep that he doesn’t know exactly who or what he is anymore.It’s like you become invisible.” 42Fiercely intuitive, unconventionally intellectual, danger-ously experimental, Jeff Buckley emerged seriously ready toplay, to learn, and to grow in the hustle and bustle of coffee-house culture.He approached each session like a communionwith his musical heroes and an opportunity to absorb theineffable secrets of musical genius.S c h o o l o f R o c k :T h e P u n k C h a n t e u s e w i t h a P e n i sThe guy had a really punk rock soul.He wantedto use all of the music that was within his grasp.Hehad a way of digesting and channeling this stuff andmaking it his.—David Fricke43I wanted to dash myself on the rocks.I just wantedto work.I wanted to be a chanteuse.44• 52 •GRACEIn the spring of 1992, with Nirvana’s Nevermind sitting atop the album charts and Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” shifting intoheavy rotation on AOR radio, just how punk rock was it toplug in an electric guitar in a lower Manhattan cafe´ waitingfor Ray Charles to hire you as his prote´ge´? What could bemore ideologically reminiscent of punk’s counter-culturalroots than to go against the grain of verse-chorus-verse,hushed-then-loud raging mosh pit culture of the momentin order to strike a very different kind of indie, d.i.y.spirit?Although Jeff Buckley would dive, in his post- Grace years, into a fuller embrace of punk and alt-rock subculture (hewas, however, known for spontaneously incorporating thelikes of Bad Brains into his evolving solo sets during thisperiod), no one could argue with the fact that he, all along,had a “punk rock soul [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]