New Age Music and New Sounds, November, 1994
By Corrado Spotti
Submitted by Sai
Translated by me
The son of the great Tim is shown, since the first album, an interesting innovator of the rock scene, with intense and deep ballads, seeking a viscerality of emotion and suffering. A short portrait.
Jeff Buckley has almost everything. a wonderful voice, a look suitable for the MTV era, the comfort of the legend deposited on his already sturdy shoulders by a mythical father who disappeared too early, a multinational of the album that believes in its abilities and that, to put it under contract, has beaten a fierce competition, two records (the debut EP and the recent album Grace) very well received by critics. His own official debut took place in New York, in April 1991, during a concert-tribute to his father Tim, held in St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn. But in spite of his many talents, twenty-eight year old Jeff is anything but a serene musician.
In his music there are unexpected stylistic contrasts, which seem to underline varying moods. And Jeff Buckley the man is no different than the musician. He's a modern Jim Morrison, who better modulates the voice. In his convoluted creativity, the traumatic paternal affair plays an important role: "I never mention him among my influences for the simple fact that he has never had much to do with my life, I've never met him. I met once when I was 8. We went to visit him, but he was working and I could not even talk to him," Jeff hisses, showing a bit of maliciousness. He is already ready to agree with Oscar Wilde: "at the beginning the children love their parents, after a while they judge them, rarely, or almost never, they forgive them".
Yet, listening to Jeff Buckley's celestial and ductile voice, it is not difficult to recognize the value of the paternal chromosomes, to reconstruct the paths of a vocalism that, starting from the second half of the Sixties, has opened new horizons to the rock song. But the existential parable of the father Tim, unfortunately accustomed to the times (death by overdose), will not be followed by Jeff. "I distrust the idealists: they have combined too much trouble with that excuse, I realize that I live in an era dominated by the visual media, which greatly affect the tastes of the public, people always expect something more in spectacular terms. It is no longer possible to be pure and simple artists, and frankly this kind of approach irritates me, but I can not do anything about it, I myself am a product of a superficial age...".
But the cultural references of the new Buckley are firmly anchored in the tradition of the last decades: among the musicians the idols of the seventies; between the literati and the poets all the exponents of the beat generation, that must have inflamed a few decades ago also the father.
Jeff loves to play with the covers, leaving perhaps to understand a not yet well developed songwriter skills. So he mentions Van Morrison and Edith Piaf, Elkie Brooks and Leonard Cohen with an easy grunt. His sound settings are entirely in tune with an atmosphere of total stylistic openness and the themes of the passages go from the mystic-liberating ones of "Eternal Life" to the confidential ones of "Mojo Pin". Buckley often tends towards jazz and contemporary music, also allowing some reinterpretations of the more archaic blues spirit.
And above all, it tends to make its production a cathartic element. In Grace, this ruffled twenty-eight year old wants to go in search of an expressive dimension that is the direct emanation of his psyche. The spirit, once again, is that of confession, also developed with the use of a creative form of trance: "you can reach particular states, in which the music comes to describe what people are really feeling intimately...I'm not talking about things that can be bought in a store, there are really extraordinary qualities in people that can be achieved through music".
And there is no doubt that Jeff Buckley, in his first work on long-distance, succeeds in convincing with his expressive strength even the most skeptical ready to crucify him on the basis of a comparison with his father's musical heritage.
By Corrado Spotti
Submitted by Sai
Translated by me
The son of the great Tim is shown, since the first album, an interesting innovator of the rock scene, with intense and deep ballads, seeking a viscerality of emotion and suffering. A short portrait.
Jeff Buckley has almost everything. a wonderful voice, a look suitable for the MTV era, the comfort of the legend deposited on his already sturdy shoulders by a mythical father who disappeared too early, a multinational of the album that believes in its abilities and that, to put it under contract, has beaten a fierce competition, two records (the debut EP and the recent album Grace) very well received by critics. His own official debut took place in New York, in April 1991, during a concert-tribute to his father Tim, held in St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn. But in spite of his many talents, twenty-eight year old Jeff is anything but a serene musician.
In his music there are unexpected stylistic contrasts, which seem to underline varying moods. And Jeff Buckley the man is no different than the musician. He's a modern Jim Morrison, who better modulates the voice. In his convoluted creativity, the traumatic paternal affair plays an important role: "I never mention him among my influences for the simple fact that he has never had much to do with my life, I've never met him. I met once when I was 8. We went to visit him, but he was working and I could not even talk to him," Jeff hisses, showing a bit of maliciousness. He is already ready to agree with Oscar Wilde: "at the beginning the children love their parents, after a while they judge them, rarely, or almost never, they forgive them".
Yet, listening to Jeff Buckley's celestial and ductile voice, it is not difficult to recognize the value of the paternal chromosomes, to reconstruct the paths of a vocalism that, starting from the second half of the Sixties, has opened new horizons to the rock song. But the existential parable of the father Tim, unfortunately accustomed to the times (death by overdose), will not be followed by Jeff. "I distrust the idealists: they have combined too much trouble with that excuse, I realize that I live in an era dominated by the visual media, which greatly affect the tastes of the public, people always expect something more in spectacular terms. It is no longer possible to be pure and simple artists, and frankly this kind of approach irritates me, but I can not do anything about it, I myself am a product of a superficial age...".
But the cultural references of the new Buckley are firmly anchored in the tradition of the last decades: among the musicians the idols of the seventies; between the literati and the poets all the exponents of the beat generation, that must have inflamed a few decades ago also the father.
Jeff loves to play with the covers, leaving perhaps to understand a not yet well developed songwriter skills. So he mentions Van Morrison and Edith Piaf, Elkie Brooks and Leonard Cohen with an easy grunt. His sound settings are entirely in tune with an atmosphere of total stylistic openness and the themes of the passages go from the mystic-liberating ones of "Eternal Life" to the confidential ones of "Mojo Pin". Buckley often tends towards jazz and contemporary music, also allowing some reinterpretations of the more archaic blues spirit.
And above all, it tends to make its production a cathartic element. In Grace, this ruffled twenty-eight year old wants to go in search of an expressive dimension that is the direct emanation of his psyche. The spirit, once again, is that of confession, also developed with the use of a creative form of trance: "you can reach particular states, in which the music comes to describe what people are really feeling intimately...I'm not talking about things that can be bought in a store, there are really extraordinary qualities in people that can be achieved through music".
And there is no doubt that Jeff Buckley, in his first work on long-distance, succeeds in convincing with his expressive strength even the most skeptical ready to crucify him on the basis of a comparison with his father's musical heritage.
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