T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  CHAPTER 22

  Jazz Man

  Burnett’s 2014 commencement speech at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications—whose Innovation Lab was headed by his friend Jonathan Taplin, the former tour manager for Bob Dylan, film producer, and the investment adviser who helped the Bass Brothers defend Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid—was pretty scattered. Like a zookeeper running after escaping animals, he was too busy chasing the next big thought to stay on the current one. But as a collection of impassioned statements, the talk hit its mark, none more squarely than with his declaration that “Louis Armstrong did more to communicate our message of freedom and innovation than any single person in the last 100 years.”

  In the 1920s, with such three-minute masterpieces as “West End Blues,” Armstrong single-handedly changed the course of popular music through his invention of the improvised jazz solo (until then, bands played collectively). The trumpeter and cornetist went on to shake up convention with his extraordinary vocal style and brilliance as an entertainer. But at the same time, the man called Satchmo continued to honor the New Orleans and Chicago traditions from which he emerged. It is that sense of connection between present and past, between upholding tradition and rewriting it, that defines much of Burnett’s work as an artist.

  In 2002, Burnett took advantage of the opportunity to indulge his love of Satchmo by producing A Wonderful World, a collection of Armstrong favorites as sung by Tony Bennett and k. d. lang. Burnett and Bennett had hit it off during their session for Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. “T Bone is very intuitive and he looks to capture the moment of the performance very much like one would take a photograph,” Bennett told me. “He concentrates on keeping it spontaneous rather than getting overly caught up in the technical aspects.”

  If the O Brother soundtrack was comfort food for Americans following the attacks of 9/11, A Wonderful World’s embrace of the Great American Songbook was a red, white, and blue cake. For once as a producer, Burnett did not get to shape the album with a free hand. The backing musicians were Bennett’s, including the pianist-arranger Lee Musiker (who had replaced the singer’s longtime accompanist, Ralph Sharon) and the zippy drummer Clayton Cameron. The veteran orchestrator Peter Matz was in place for three lushly arranged songs, and the distinguished tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton was on hand as a guest soloist. Plus, A Wonderful World was recorded not in the friendly confines of one of Burnett’s regular haunts, but over three days at Bennett Studios, a new facility in Englewood, New Jersey, built on the site of an old railroad station by Tony and his son Dae Bennett, an engineer. Actually, the music was performed live on the stage of the adjacent Harms Theater and piped into the control room through a sixty-four-channel fiber-optic cable. (For Burnett, this was a precursor to the cross-country concert he performed in 2013 with the singer-guitarist Chuck Mead of the band BR5–49 over a broadband connection. He was in an LA studio, Mead at an outdoor park in Chattanooga, Tennessee.)

  Even as a “visiting” player, though, Burnett left his mark on the relaxed, elegantly understated performances. It has been one of the unspoken rules of marquee duets that the singing partners indulge in showbizzy mannerisms to create the illusion of intimacy. In sharp contrast, Bennett and lang, reflecting the congenial atmosphere Burnett created for them, connect with unforced ease across styles and generations (Bennett was seventy-six, lang forty-one). “What a Wonderful World,” a 1967 hit for Armstrong, is rife with sentimentality, but Burnett draws genuine feeling from Bennett and lang—whose lungpower is one of her calling cards—by having them play it close to the vest.

  Neither Bennett nor lang can be considered a jazz artist. But like the popular artists he idolized—namely, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra—Bennett can swing with the best of them. And lang, an eclectic singer whose career has encompassed country-punk and chanteuse-style pop, has learned from her heroes—notably Peggy Lee and Rosemary Clooney (to whom Burnett and Sam Phillips paid tribute at a memorial concert in December 2002)—how to inhabit a jazz sensibility. For Burnett, of course, treating jazz as something apart from other genres of American music is an exercise in artificiality. The sounds of jazz, he declared in his USC speech, are of a piece with all the other sounds with which this country has defined its character, going back to “Johnny Is Gone for a Soldier,” “John Brown’s Body,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  As the producer of singer Cassandra Wilson’s 2006 album Thunderbird, Burnett found himself working with an artist who played a significant role in expanding the meaning of jazz. Beginning with her striking 1993 album Blue Light ’til Dawn, she made a specialty of crossing genres with her dusky contralto, covering artists ranging from Van Morrison and Hank Williams to the Monkees and, most spectacularly, Robert Johnson. With her resistance to basic swing—hers is a luxuriant approach to melody that blurs time and stretches lines—she alienated some mainstream critics for whom her music didn’t mean a thing. And yet, in saying he wanted to make “an honest to goodness, real life jazz record” with the then forty-nine-year-old Wilson, hailing her as “the premier jazz singer of the day,” Burnett compared her to the sweetly swinging, bebop-charged Ella Fitzgerald—her polar opposite, stylistically.

  What did he mean by “real life jazz”? Did he want to return Wilson to the mainstream approach of her one and only standards album, Blue Skies (1988)? Did he want to record her live in a hallowed jazz club like New York’s Village Vanguard? Having been introduced to her music through her haunting recording of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (he met her during the recording of the 2003 soundtrack album he executive-produced for TV’s Crossing Jordan), did he want to produce an album of songs associated with Lady Day? All Wilson knew when she showed up at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles to record Thunderbird was that, with the exception of her longtime bassist Reginald Veal, she would be playing without her regular accompanists. “Maybe I said I was interested in the new methodology, the whole sampling thing, maybe I didn’t,” she told me in 2006 for a No Depression profile. “I only know I wanted to experiment with that stuff, and that’s what happened.”

  Burnett, as it turned out, wasn’t interested in channeling Ella. He wanted to come up with songs that would “penetrate the zeitgeist” for Wilson the way “O Death” had for Ralph Stanley. Time magazine may have named her “America’s Best Singer” in 2001, but she was still much less widely known than jazz’s perennial “It” girl, Diana Krall. And she was nowhere near the commercial force of her labelmate Norah Jones. Venturing into new territory, Burnett backed her with members of his “kill squad” band, then doing double duty on The True False Identity, plus the bassist-programmer Mike Elizondo, who had produced Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine, a handy point of reference.

  From the start, Wilson found herself participating in a novel kind of group collaboration. The wistful, backbeat-style groove number “It Would Be So Easy” and the bumptious lead track “Go to Mexico” began as wide-open jams that went on as long as thirty minutes. The latter song, which became the album’s featured cut, started out with a brief vocal sample of “Hey Pocky A-Way” by the Wild Tchoupitoulas, New Orleans’ beloved Mardi Gras Indians. Isolated in a booth with her acoustic guitar, Wilson sang spontaneous lyrics she said were influenced by the Robert Rodriguez Mariachi movies she had been watching and thoughts of a vacation south of the border. She orchestrated her own overdubbed vocals like horns, in some cases singing the words backwards. “There’s some really crazy stuff in there,” she said.

  The heart of Thunderbird, however, is the blues, which in Wilson’s close embrace shares a profound intimacy with jazz. On “Easy Rider,” the Blind Lemon Jefferson staple, Burnett cagily matched her up with the Canadian blues guitarist (and O Brother contributor) Colin Linden. What begins as a slow-burning, prefeminist soliloquy—“There’s gonna be a time when a woman don’t need no man / So hush your mouth, stop raisin’ sand”—breaks out into an incendiary seven-minute epic of alternating hope and despair. Wilson
and company also transform Willie Dixon’s “I Want to Be Loved” from an upbeat rouser into a leisurely but powerfully plainspoken statement. Linden and the Delta blues guitarist Keb’ Mo’ extend the melody with alternately stinging and trembling effects while dual drummers Jim Keltner and Bill Maxwell (another old Fort Worth crony) surround it.

  Burnett and Wilson did record one tune from the jazz songbook, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” a late-1930s classic by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II that Wilson had sung in performance. But her recording was tossed out for being too “jazz-standardy.” In an intriguing move, Burnett had her record Jakob Dylan’s Wallflowers ballad “Closer to You” as a standard. “A singer of Cassandra’s caliber should be able to sing any kind of song that touches her, and that she can touch,” he told JazzTimes. “And then it becomes what it is she does. And I think it would loosely become ‘jazz’—in the old, coarse sense of the word.”

  Burnett, Wilson said, had an elusive quality in the studio, raising questions in soft tones, almost under his breath, and then disappearing. “I got a sense early on that he commanded the space in a way that was indicative of a very evolved spirit,” she told the JazzTimes columnist Nate Chinen. “Most producers like to be hands-on; they’re there, they’re ever-present, they’re hovering and indicating and instructing. And T Bone is just the opposite. If those qualities are there, they’re very discreet.”

  “He makes you feel like you don’t have time restraints even though you do,” she told me. “We talked in the way that Southerners talk, in stories—very casually and, you know, you say a thing without saying it.” (It bears pointing out that Wilson was going through a rough patch at the time. Her mother was in the early throes of Alzheimer’s, and Wilson’s personal life was in turmoil. Burnett’s emotional support was as important as his creative support.)

  The recording of Thunderbird was spread out over many months, during which time Burnett, his hip-hop-savvy co-producer Keefus Ciancia, and Wilson shared changes in the music via file exchanges. Working with various samples, some from outside sources, Ciancia and audio engineer Mike Piersante put the finishing touches on the album at Electromagnetic, using Burnett’s vintage console. From out of town, Burnett and Wilson checked on the mixes via Internet. Welcome to the modern world of making records.

  Two of the songs ended up in Wim Wenders’s 2005 film Don’t Come Knocking, starring Sam Shepard: a stormy arrangement of “Strike a Match,” which as sung by Wilson in a tricky time scheme takes on dramatic new meaning, and “Lost,” a shimmering duet by Wilson and Marc Ribot. But Thunderbird fell far short of zeitgeist penetration. The album peaked at No. 184 on the Billboard Top 200—forty-three places lower than her Grammy-winning New Moon Daughter. Wilson settled back into her usual mode for a few albums, recorded a romantic set of originals with the Italian guitarist and producer Fabrizio Sotti, and then leaped into the fray again in 2015 with a boldly conceived, darkly orchestrated Billie Holiday tribute to which Burnett contributed on guitar and Van Dyke Parks with string arrangements.

  Performing songs from the album at Chicago’s Thalia Hall, backed by a band with avant-garde leanings that treated the songs and arrangements to scrappy textures, Wilson further revised her Billie concept. But though the venue is known for its first-rate acoustics, I found it difficult to get past the harshness of the live sound. Was I hearing too many jagged digital lines and not enough analog curves? Or had I bought so deeply into Burnett’s concept of sound that I was experiencing the music through his ears? More on that later, but first some thoughts on Burnett’s next jazz experiment.

  It wasn’t surprising when Diana Krall, who has had her own serious flirtations with pop and happens to be married to Elvis Costello, turned to Burnett to produce an album. Unlike Wilson, Krall has spent most of her career basking in jazz tradition, adopting as models the early, easy-swinging piano trios of Nat King Cole and the joyful stride of Fats Waller. But Elvis had nudged her toward pop in co-writing songs for her 2004 album The Girl in the Other Room; with her husband on board as a guest contributor, she brought in Burnett to handle her 2012 effort, Glad Rag Doll—a throwback album of a different sort that collected favorite songs of her father’s dating back to the 1920s and 1930s.

  With her whispery/husky vocals, commitment to swing, and proud ties to tradition, Krall would seem to be a stronger candidate for a “real life jazz” album than would Wilson. But in some ways, Glad Rag Doll is even more of a stylistic outlier than is Thunderbird. Backed by Burnett’s edgy sessioneers, Krall frequently seems like she is on a different page than the one being written for her. Her attributes as a vocalist do not include the ability to impose her will on a song: Though her ramshackle, Dave Brubeckian sound on an old Steinway upright fits the bill, her vocal is too thin for Betty James’s wide-body, blues-rockabilly workout “I’m a Little Mixed Up.” Once “There Ain’t No Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears,” a 1920s hit for Annette Hanshaw, leaves the station, powered by Marc Ribot’s space-age accents and Bellerose’s rambunctious New Orleans beat, Krall can only try to keep up. And you can almost hear her sighs of relief at the conclusion of a cosmic banjo and reverb treatment of Doc Pomus’s “Lonely Avenue,” Ray Charles’s recording of which was one of Burnett’s favorites.

  Glad Rag Doll does have its moments. On the title song, Krall’s lilting contralto is partnered with Ribot’s Spanish-style acoustic guitar to lovely effect. “Let It Rain” is a fetching pop-soul ballad swept along by Bellerose’s loose, raggedy strokes. And ultimately, Burnett—who says he never thinks about a record’s commercial prospects in the studio, instead concentrating only on how well things are flowing—did okay by Krall, chart-wise. Glad Rag Doll did not go platinum, as have most of her albums, but it rose to No. 6 on the Billboard chart and was certified as a gold album. It is fair to ask, though, whether Burnett did right by Krall and jazz in an artistic sense. “It was such a blast to work with [Burnett],” she told the Seattle Times, adding, “That album was a life-changing experience for me, in every way. I’m just feeling so comfortable with myself now.” But judging by the speed with which Krall returned to the safety of the commercially slick producer David Foster for her next album, apparently comfort wasn’t enough.

  As a producer, Burnett has trusted bluegrass and blues and gospel to stand up on their own, but there is little sense here that he trusted jazz to do anything of the sort, pushing Krall so far out of her comfort zone that she is on alien soil. Will Glad Rag Doll be remembered as a Diana Krall album or a T Bone Burnett album? Where does the producer end and the artist begin? And does it matter? Burnett has never been fond of musicians taking a proprietary view of their work, as in “my solo” or “my part.” He approaches art—which he aspires to make with every recording, however commercial—with a one-for-all-and-all-for-one perspective.

  “All art comes out of community,” he told Drowned in Sound, “and when communities can get together and not fight over who gets what piece, and instead can say ‘this is ours—let’s make it great,’ it just ends up being better. As soon as someone says ‘this is mine,’ then it all starts fragmenting and fracturing, so to get the spirit of a piece of art right, everyone has to be generous.”

  Being generous also means sharing in failures. “When something is not working out,” said Jay Bellerose, “T Bone always blames it on the whole, never on the guitar part or the drum part. He’s gentle about tipping things in a different direction. Sometimes he’ll toss out a reference to get people on track, like ‘Make it more like [Miles Davis’s] Bitches Brew.’ Some great music has been created with tension, but he goes another way. He’s always about keeping morale up.”

  Whatever position you take on album ownership, one thing is clear: if Burnett once took satisfaction in disappearing into the finished product and “not messing with the groove,” he was now leaving as unmistakable a John Hancock on recordings as have Daniel Lanois and Phil Spector. The deeper he pushed into the 2000s, the more refined that bottom-rich, percussiv
ely shaded sound became, and the more common the sonic foundations for artists as different as John Mellencamp and Lisa Marie Presley. An increasing number of critics and colleagues expressed their reservations about Burnett’s production style.

  The straight-talking indie producer Steve Albini, whose mainstream projects include Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s Walking into Clarksdale, asserts that producers shouldn’t shape things to their own tastes. Posting on ProSoundWeb, he wrote that Elvis Costello was “dramatically better with Nick Lowe’s less mannered production” than Burnett’s. “I want the band’s record to be theirs—really, completely theirs,” he wrote. In his otherwise positive review of Gregg Allman’s 2011 album Low Country Blues (which we’ll get to in the next chapter), the Rolling Stone writer David Fricke was critical of the “austere, consciously antique production. . . . It’s as if Burnett tried a little too hard to create the illusion of empty bedrooms and roads that go on forever, when it’s all in that voice.” Hearing Allman with fresh ears was the last thing his hard-core followers wanted. As crazy as it seems, some sound experts, self-appointed and professional, find Raising Sand unlistenable.

  Unexpectedly, Burnett redeemed himself as a jazz producer, and made his deepest and truest push into the music, on the Broadway veteran Betty Buckley’s 2014 album Ghostlight. A lifelong friend of his going back to their youth in Fort Worth, Buckley is still best known for wringing every last drop of emotion from “Memory” in the original 1982 Broadway production of Cats. But her beautifully restrained reading of “Body and Soul” here is one of the best versions of that jazz staple in years. And her impassioned treatment of “Throw It Away” by the late jazz singer Abbey Lincoln, a neglected songwriter, helps correct that injustice.