Oh, Rickie, You're So Fine

Part of the genius of Rickie Lee Jones is erratic behavior. Not boring, drug-related, custody-battle erratic behavior, either. Instead, the singer and songwriter goes through bouts of experimental noise, quits recording when she doesn't feel inspired, and got famous in the first place for sounding and looking like a beatnik in the 1970s. Aside from musical dalliances like getting Mike Watt to play on one of her records or dabbling in swing jazz, she's way into gardening and radical politics. Her Web site shows a recent photo of her (resembling Lauren Bacall, as usual) sitting in a café "six hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle." This is the kind of erratic we like. She's best-known for 1979's "Chuck E.'s in Love," a great song, to be sure, but her four-week residency here covers all eras of her varied career, from Chuck E. to her new record, The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, currently getting good reviews. Each show is different, but all feature the voice that's come to be the sound of blasé tough cuties everywhere.
Tuesdays, 8:30 p.m. Starts: Jan. 15. Continues through Feb. 5, 2008