An Evening with RICKIE LEE JONES

Hailed as one of the great songwriters of her generation, Rickie Lee Jones will be bringing her brand new covers album Kicks to The Cedar.

This is a seated show with a Center Section and a General Admission Section. Ticket holders with Center Section seats will be able to sit in a special reserved block of seats located in the center section of the room. Those with General Admission tickets will be welcome to sit anywhere else in the room. The Cedar is happy to reserve seats for patrons who require special seating accommodations. To request seating or other access accommodations, please go to our Access page.

General Admission tickets are available online, by phone, at Electric Fetus, and at The Cedar during shows.

Center Section tickets are sold out.

"Rarely has a singer-songwriter inhabited other people’s work so completely, but Jones proves herself, again, as one of the most inventive and imaginative interpreters operating today – it’s to her credit that she can, as ever, make 70s radio mainstays make perfect sense alongside jazz jewels from the 40s."

— Glide Magazine

Rickie Lee Jones

Think of what you are about to read as a documentary film of sorts, replete with close-ups and fade-outs, starring the premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation, Rickie Lee Jones.

In this film we see: Rickie Lee Jones’ face, her distinctive mouth, and her thick, beyond shoulder length blonde hair as she walks down a road in a bucolic section of Tacoma, Washington, where she currently resides. It is springtime. She does not wear shoes. She carries a guitar. The sky overhead is as shiny as mica. As Jones searches for a place to sit and play in the sun, we see various aspects of her contemporary life come into frame, engaging Jones’ attention as she smiles, and listens, and reflects. We see her daughter, Charlotte Rose; Jones’ mother and siblings; various friends. All of these people come and go, passing in front of, and behind, our primary focus: Rickie Lee Jones playing her guitar and singing any number of her award winning songs: "Chuck E.’s in Love," or her interpretation of the classic, "Making Whoopee," for which she won a Grammy in 1990.

As Rickie Lee Jones sings, we hear, in voice over: Rickie Lee Jones is the second of three daughters and one son who are of Welsh and Irish ancestry. She was born on November 8, 1954, in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents, Richard Loris Jones and Bettye Jane Jones, both had peripatetic childhoods: her father lived from hand to mouth in a number of transient hotels, and rode the rails, wandering the country. Her mother was an orphan. She has described her family as "lower-middle-class-hillbilly-hipster.

When Rickie was fourteen, she was living in Arizona with her father. Jones has said in an interview that her mother was always afraid she would run away--a heartbreak she couldn’t take--and so sent her to live with her father; her parents were separated by then. Jones recalls that she once ran away from her father as a result of his need to control his wildly imaginative young daughter, her burgeoning sexuality and charisma, and powerful talent. In an interview for a Rolling Stone cover story published in 1979, Jones said: "I never knew when I was gong to leave. I might be walking over to a kid’s house, then of all a sudden I would just stick out my thumb and hitchhike across three states."

By the time she nineteen, Jones was living in Los Angeles, waiting tables and occasionally playing music in out of the way coffee houses and bars. All the while, she was developing her unique aesthetic: music that was sometimes spoken, often beautifully sung, and while emotionally accessible, she was writing lyrics as taut and complex as any by the great American poet, Elizabeth Bishop. In her voice and songs, we saw smoky stocking seams, love being everything but requited. And it was during these years that Jones’ song, "Easy Money," caught the attention of one musician and then the music industry. The song was recorded by Lowell George, the founder of the band, Little Feat. He used it on his solo album, Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here. Warner Brothers auditioned Jones and quickly signed her to the label.

Her debut on Warners, Rickie Lee Jones, released in 1979, won the grammy for Best New Artist. She was hailed by one critic as a "highly touted new pop-jazz-singer-songwriter" and another critic as "one of the best--if not the best--artist of her generation." In addition to the album’s brilliant songs--including the exceptional "On Saturday Afternoons in 1963," the haunting "Last Chance Texaco," and the popular "Chuck E’s in Love"--Jones was becoming a figure whose life was bearing a great deal of emulation by young women and men who found, in her deep and personal and idiosyncratic life and work, a model for the new generation of hipster: She was heralded as a trendsetter in dress (beret, sundresses, heels) and in lifestyle, given her by then famous relationship with two boys she helped to make famous, too: Chuck E. Weiss, a Los Angeles character, and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits, about whom Rickie has said: "We walk around the same streets, and I guess it's primarily a jazz-motivated situation for both of us. We're living on the jazz side of life."

To touch on Rickie’s recent work, on September 18, 2012, Jones released The Devil You Know on Concorde Records. The Devil You Know includes a collection of covers produced by famed musician Ben Harper.

On 2014, for the first new work she’d written in over a decade, Rickie launched a PledgeMusic campaign to offset the costs of recording, musicians and production, with total success. In June 2015 Jones released The Other Side of Desire and the album has excellent reviews.