A Cure For Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage
- Aug 21, 2024
- 2 min read
★★★★☆
I got this from my cousin with whom I’d seen Joe Jackson perform at Liberty Hall in Lawrence, Kansas on the Night and Day II tour on December 7, 2000. It was a thrill to finally see him, even if I’d largely stopped paying attention to his music after 1984’s Body and Soul, if only in the hopes of seeing some of my favorite songs done live as I’d heard them time and again on my turntable. I didn’t know anything about Joe Jackson the man and little more about Joe Jackson the musician other than, like his contemporary Elvis Costello, he was musically restless, constantly seeking new modes of expression. The show was fantastic, his band top-notch, but, never having experienced this before, I left with a slight tinge of disappointment as Jackson and his band had reworked his classic material into new, unfamiliar arrangements.
Joe Jackson’s A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage isn’t exactly a rags-to-riches tale, but it’s not too far afield either. In between the sheets of his story from growing up “white trash” (as an American girlfriend told him when she saw his childhood neighborhood, Paulsgrove, in Portsmouth, aka Pompey, on England’s south coast, years later), attending the Royal Academy of Music, gigging in any, and every, possible way, just to be playing music, the release of his first album, Look Sharp!, and, in six brief pages, of an already-brief 285-page book, the roughly 20 years post-debut (the usual: pop success, disillusionment, rediscovery), Jackson waxes philosophical about music, about life, and about a life in music with clarity, honesty, intelligence, passion, a wicked sense of humor, and just a dash of mildly-cantankerous soapbox sermonizing.
Jackson lost me in the 1990s as he lost his way with pop music and then turned to classical and instrumental music. In 2003, he was back—with Volume 4, the first Joe Jackson Band album since 1980’s Beat Crazy. Since then, he has remained as musically restless as ever, recording as a not-quite-jazz piano-bass-drums trio (Rain), releasing an idiosyncratic tribute to Duke Ellington (Duke), and, most recently, a rousing and pitch-perfect British music hall pastiche (What a Racket!). If none of them have reached the heights of his first six albums, they’ve at least held my interest, and, in many cases, done much more than that. It’s not always wise to get to know your musical heroes better than they reveal themselves through their music, but with A Cure for Gravity, getting to know Joe Jackson the man has helped me better appreciate Joe Jackson the musician. You can’t ask for much more than that.
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