Buckley's haunting songs are mesmerizing

The Star Ledger: February 28, 1994

By Ben Horowitz

  Jeff Buckley, a unique, improvisational electric guitarist and singer, accomplished a number of rare feats during his solo performance on Saturday night at Maxwell's in Hoboken.

  When he played a lilting, chiming version of Edith Piaf's "Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin" (I Don't Know the End), the packed house stood still in utter silence. As tears filled his eyes during the final, dreamy refrain of "oh, mon amour," the song suddenly ended and the only sound before the applause was a young woman's one-word reaction: "Wow."

  It was like that during most of his set. Patrons at Maxwell's and other clubs generally talk and move around while the music is going. But Buckley-an intense eccentric with talent dripping from his fingertips-commanded the audience's complete attention.

  Meanwhile, his slow to mid-tempo, extended numbers were defying categorization.

 During "Grace," for example, his guitar changed from airy, high riffery with jazz-like chord changes to heavy, dissonant licks with a Jimi Hendrix influence. At the time his singing was shifting from falsetto chants to scats to emotional verses.

  Buckley headlined a diverse, eclectic double bill where the opening act was Kate Jacobs, a wonderful country-rock singer songwriter who remains Hoboken's best-kept secret.

  Buckley's boyish, art student-like good looks and troubled presence strongly recalled his father, the late Tim Buckley, best known for the haunting, ethereal hippie anthems on his classic 1967 folk-rock album, Goodbye and Hello.

  The elder Buckley moved to avant-garde jazz before dying from a drug overdose at the age of 28 in 1975.

  Jeff Buckley's voice is about two octaves lower than his father's, but it shares Tim's tortured intensity and experimental tendencies. Ironically, Jeff recalls meeting his father only once after Tim split from his mother in 1966, the year Jeff was born.

  Jeff, under contract with Sony/Columbia Records, could be headed for stardom, but he does seem guaranteed of at least cult status. His debut EP, Live at Sin-e, came out last year and Columbia expects to release his first full-length album in the spring.

  During the Maxwell's show, Jeff Buckley's guitar virtuosity showed a wide gamut of influences: He sounded like Jimmy Page meeting Stanley Jordan on an ominous, cloudy day.

  Buckley opened the show with an extended a capella chanting in a black spiritual style before moving into verses accompanied by jagged, dissonant, jazzy guitar riffs on "The Last Goodbye."

  "Mojo Pin" found Buckley shifting from a jazz take on the English folk-style riffs sometimes favored by Led Zeppelin into heavy, feedback-drenched segments.

  Buckley came closest to his father's sound on "Forget Her," a haunting, melodic, passionate song in a folk-jazz vein.

  Buckley's set peaked with the Piaf song, which came towards the end and was so gorgeous and refined it rendered the final two numbers anticlimactic.

  Buckley was on stage for less than an hour, but that was enough soul-searching intensity for one night. Had the set gone on much longer, it would have been like having an unnecessary, extra portion of a rich but filling delicacy.

Impressive Buckley

Now magazine: February 17, 1994

By Tim Perlich 

Submitted by Karen Pace/Steven Bodrug

Jeff Buckley, opening for Wind May Do Damage, with Rory McLeod, at Ultrasound, Sunday, February 13. Attendance: 175. Tickets: Free. Rating: NNNN (highly entertaining)

  Without fanfare, a disheveled Jeff Buckley, in an oversized new coat, took the Ultrasound stage with a confident New York spring.

  The between-set chatter of the near-capacity crowd slowly dissolved, more out of curiosity than deference. As the spindly singer/songwriter started to twiddle his pick against the strings of his low-slung Telecaster, you could see a moan beginning to take shape in his throat.

  When he finally opened his mouth, a strange, weeping howl leapt out and filled the room. People stopped drinking in mid-gulp. The club became very, very quiet-so quiet that between Buckley's breaths the only sound was the air being sucked through the ceiling vents.

  The great care he took in building his song shapes made it known that this wasn't going to be Tim Buckley's son trying to use his good family name as leverage in promoting his debut "product." Nope. Those sounds belonged solely to Jeff Buckley, and he was excreting them because it's just a natural bodily function.

  His guitar playing technique is surprisingly accomplished. Buckley strikes chords with the self-assurance of a music school grad who no longer feels obliged to drop suspended sevenths and diminished ninths just because he can. The brief time Buckley spent alongside serious slinger Gary Lucas in God's And Monsters clearly served to set him straight.

  Yet you tend to forget he's even strapped in when that voice swoops up in a piercing falsetto, then comes crashing down in waves.

  Buckley is still stretching, still testing his limits. There are moments where he flutters with a grand flourish where a simple whisper might have conveyed so much more. His banter sometimes betrays a certain greeness. You could sense the entire house cringe when he noted with surprise that there was "actual Jamaican-style jerk children in Toronto." Fortunately, quickly sensed an impending brush back and acquitted himself admirably by pleading ignorance.

  For an encore, Buckley came back with an impressive 10-minute deconstruction of Sweet Thing. It's no small task to take on a Van Morrison song-they come so thoroughly marked with Van's own personal stamp-but Buckley stylishly delivered it like something he'd written on the cab ride over. Nice one.

Next big thing tag no sweat for gifted singer Jeff Buckley

Now: February 10, 1994

By Tim Perlich

Submitted by Karen Pace/Steven Bodrug

Jeff Buckley, with Wind May Do Damage, and Rory McLeod, at Ultrasound (269 Queen West), Sunday, February 13, 8 pm. Free. 593-0540

Jeff Buckley, at C'est What (67 Front East), Monday, February 14, 8 pm. Free. 867-9499

  Ever since Elvis enlisted, there has been an opening for a young free spirit to step forward and take over as America's larger-than-life celebrity saviour.

  For the past three decades, Columbia Records has led the star search. Bob Dylan looked like a shoo-in before the motorcycle mishap. And for a minute, Bruce Springsteen was a solid contender-except those three-hour concerts never did translate in the video age. But Columbia may have stumbled upon a winner in Jeff Buckley.

  It's still too early to tell, but the handsome 26-year-old singer/songwriter, who grew up in "white trashvilles across California," appears eminently qualified for the job of cross-generational musical icon.

  Before he ever set foot in a recording studio, the myth-making cogs of the music industry machine were already turning his way. The fact that the son of the hauntingly voiced Tim Buckley, who died tragically in 1975, was showing a musical inclination was all legend starved rock writers needed to know to christen the kid Next Big Thing.

  In the midst of all the hoopla, no one thought to ask the young Buckley if he had any interest in being king.

  "I've never approached a record label in my life," says Buckley from his hotel bed during a stopover in Austin. "I never thought about signing a record deal, I never even thought about being a musician-it's just something I did from the time I was a child. Now I'm beginning to go deeper and deeper into it. I haven't really achieved anything significant.

Folk label

  "I've been in bands since I was 13. I was playing with a band in New York but it wasn't making any money, so I had to start doing solo gigs to pay my bills. But I've never been into the Bob Dylan thing. I don't consider myself a folk singer, although people have been calling me that lately. Anytime somebody stands on stage by himself, people want to call it folk music. It's just music-my music.

  "Playing solo was important for me because I needed to listen to where my music was heading. I knew that in such a setting I would find the voice leading me back to the origins of a sonic philosophy from which the rest of my music would come. I didn't want to be just another dickhead with a guitar singing about his stupid life."

  It was Buckley's stint with Gary Lucas' Gods and Monsters that first brought the out-of-towner some downtown New York Street cred, but it was his solo shows at Café Sin-é-a hip East Village hole-in-the-wall where artists like Sinéad O'Connor slip in for impromptu acoustic shows-that led to his Columbia deal and the four-track Live At Sin-é foretaste of his Andy Wallace-produced debut extravaganza.

Truth beneath covers

  Recorded over the month of August, Live at Sin-e's stripped-down covers of Van Morrison's The Way Young Lovers Do and Edith Piaf's Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin are perhaps more revealing than the two originals included.

  Not only do the cover choices confirm Buckley's refined taste, they also show off his considerable interpretive skill and his versatility. And his unself-conscious scatting and the ease with which he spontaneously tacks on an extra verse to an etched-in-rock Van anthem shows he's not opposed to taking risks for the sake of greater achievement.

  "There's nothing about the EP to give you a clear indication about what's to come," he says. "There'll probably be critics who'll take it to show I'm a zero and have nothing to offer while others may accept it for what it is. The whole thing was an immediate, instinctive experience. I just decided to do some scat singing. It's not about trying to imitate Ella Fitzgerald-its just a matter of finding a way of improvising."

  So far Buckley hasn't had to deal with much negative criticism-if any. Whether it's out of guilt for the recognition his talented father never received, or the simple thrill of the grandiloquent"I have seen the future of rock and roll..." stroke, the journalists who have covered Buckley seem determined to create a legend, whether he's willing to play along or not.

  " I can't protect myself against writers," he grumbles contemptuously. "I don't know why, for example, Bill Flannigan took such a myth-making approach in that (February 1994) Musician article. You know that part where he made a big deal of my staying on stage alone for the encore as the rest of the band left? The whole incident was so very ordinary.

  "The show was being broadcast live on a radio station where a friend of mine is a DJ. He said, 'come out and do another song,' so I played a song we did early on in the set. That was it. I can't defend myself against writers who want to inject their own flourishes.

  "I really don't know why music critics exist. They don't fit into the context of what I'm doing. If you weren't there and you didn't taste the experience, you ain't gonna get it. I don't see how the music I make can be accurately expressed in literary terms. Instead they focus on what I look like or my record deal.

 "To any real people who might be reading this, I submit, don't listen to writers. Either come and see me perform or ignore me-but listen to your heart."

Gabe's Oasis review

You Could Do Worse #3: Winter/Spring 1995

By Michael F. Nameche

The Grifters/Jeff Buckley 

Gabe's Oasis-Iowa City, IA

9 July, 1994

  Stories abound about Jeff Buckley. Before his band took the stage, my ear had collected enough second hand information about the man that I felt weighted down. I quickly decided that such rumors belong somewhere other than a live review, but to his credit, I will say that Buckley is widely regarded as "a really nice guy." Having already established the fact that he can hold a crowd a crowd captivated on his own, (check out the 1993 EP, Live at Sin-é, for the indisputable proof), Buckley brought a top-notch band to back him up on this tour. They wisely chose "Mojo Pin" as the opener, and the crowd was in rapt attention from then on.

  Visually, he was mesmerizing; every note he sang registered somewhere on his face with an emotive twitch or ripple. Toothpick legs held in a Joey Ramone stance, Jeff's stage presence burned with quiet intensity. Buckley's voice is truly incredible, an angelic coyote moan. His guitar playing is the perfect companion to that voice, often haunting and very impassioned.

  Buckley belongs among an elite group of guitarists that draw from a wellspring of unexpected emotion, something that everyone can relate to, and on this night it was obvious that the impact of what he was offering to the audience was not lost.

Buckley's music is dreamy, too

The Oregonian, May 10, 1995

By Marty Hughley of The Oregonian staff

  Rumor has it that sales of Jeff Buckley's "Grace" have shot up in the past week, equaling about one-tenth of the total from the album's previous eight months in the racks.

  If you're looking for a reason, you'll probably find it at your grocery checkout. Buckley, the 28-year-old son of the cult hero folkie Tim Buckley, has been annointed as one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People."

  On the one hand, Buckley deserves the attention-for his music as much as for his cheekbones. On the other, fans attracted by his dreamy eyes might be daunted by the challenges of his dreamy yet unpredictable music. As Buckley's Monday night performance at the Aladdin Theatre showed, he's not for the faint of attention span. Buckley has described his work as "part quagmire, part structure" and at times his songs seem to wander in place, as if that quagmire were home. But when he does throw out a good hook, it's enough to pull his performance up to peaks of crystalline beauty and intensity that make it worth waiting through the lulls.

  Standing off to the side of his three backing musicians, the singer-guitarist built his songs from moments of aching delicacy to peaks of bold declaration and paroxysms of noisy release. Covers of Leonard Cohen's bittersweet, elegiac "Hallelujah" and MC5's proto-punk "Kick Out the Jams" served as stylistic bookends.

  In between he traced his own distinct musical vision in a remarkable high tenor informed by Indian microtones, soul melisma and the honey-dripping jazz phrasing of Nina Simone. Sliding in and out of his smooth falsetto, he drew phrases out like streamers, especially on "Lover, You Should Have Come Over," "So Real," and "Grace."

  He gives these romantic reveries a yearning intensity, a dark sensuality that seems to feed off introspection as much as connection. Whereas even the most enlightened rockers seek transcendence in the heights of carnal knowledge, Buckley seems to touch grace in the afterglow.

  After all, it's that kind of sensation that lingers long after this week's People is off the racks.

  The opening act, a Los Angeles quartet called Soul Coughing, made an odd match with Buckley's dusky passions. Using drums, double bass, a sampler keyboard and occasional guitar, the band pressed out a dense blend of hip-hop, funk, rock and jazz as both cushion and launching pad for M. Doughty's oddball hipster raps. A lanky cross between a junior beat poet and a suburban B-boy wannabe, Doughty trades in inspired non sequiturs and vaguely disquieting images of modern social dislocation.

  But the smart use of the sampler for thick textures, colorful riffs, and comic asides, and the rhythm section's balance of warmth and wallop, created a consistent and engaging musical character for Doughty to inhabit.

Undated journal entry

Another recent release from the estate 🙂❤️✨

Florent le Veil poster

From the Classical Festival show with autograph