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Dressed for success?
Joe Henry has the production apparel that fits
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
Related Links

Joe Henry's Web site

Christopher Blagg reviews Joe Henry's Tiny Voices.

Joe Henry works with Ani DiFranco.

Joe Henry produces Solomon Burke's Don’t Give Up on Me.

"Joe Henry is a very cool guy," says singer Susan Tedeschi. "He shows up in Prada shoes, designer jeans, and a stylish shirt, and for someone who lives in Pasadena, he’s got a lot of Southern charm. I would walk into the studio and Joe and all the musicians he’d gathered to play on my record were better dressed than me. And he finds everybody’s strengths and brings them out, so getting great performances is easy and fun."

But Henry’s more than a clothes horse with a Zen attitude and a snoot for talent. He brings a degree of intellect, taste, insight, and musical sensitivity to creating unvarnished soul music that hasn’t been seen since Jerry Wexler was the architect of the classic pre-rock-era Atlantic Records sound. And he does so in a way that respects soul’s power — hot-wired emotionalism — and still sounds utterly contemporary.

Henry grew up listening to soul and classic country music in North Carolina, where he was born, and in Georgia before moving to New York, where he met and married Madonna’s sister, Melanie Ciccone. His first solo albums drew on those roots, but over the years his own arrangements began to incorporate more acoustic and subtly experimental elements, crossing cultures and genres. He’s brought much of that to his recent soul productions as well, which is why his own discs and the albums he’s made with Bettye LaVette, self-proclaimed King of Rock ’n’ Soul Solomon Burke, former Boston blues queen Susan Tedeschi, and Mavis Staples, Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint, Ann Peebles, and Bily Preston all seem like part of the same fabric.

For some artists, his work is transforming. "I thought I was going to die in obscurity," LaVette tells me, adding that her just-released I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise (Anti-), which Henry produced, "is getting me more interest than I’ve ever had in the 40 years I’ve been performing."

When Henry put together a band and worked with Burke on 2002’s Don’t Give Up on Me (Anti-), he made one of the year’s critical favorites and put Burke back on his throne. Henry also produced Tedeschi’s major-label debut, Hope and Desire (Verve). With a collection of classics and obscurities by a range of writers from Keith Richards ("You Got the Silver") to Bob Dylan ("Lord Protect My Child"), the disc stands to introduce Tedeschi to the same audience that loves Norah Jones without dampening her own simmering-to-incendiary approach. And without Jones’s preciousness.

Then there’s Henry’s pet project I Believe to My Soul, the first release on his own Work Song label, which is affiliated with Rhino Records and Starbucks’ Hear Music imprint. The 13-cut collaboration with the legendary soul and R&B performers Ann Peebles, Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint, Mavis Staples, and Billy Preston testifies to the heart-touching power of the voice and undiluted organic musicianship. It’s an exercise in musical honesty and also a statement of faith in the human spirit. So it’s appropriate that Henry and his cast, post-recording, decided to donate a portion of sales to Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

All that said, don’t underestimate the mojo of Henry’s sartorial splendor.

"I do believe in dressing, and in the power of shoes," he admits. "I had an epiphany a number of years ago. It occurred to me, listening to Miles Davis, that his records sound exactly like how he dressed at the time they were made. For Kind of Blue, he was wearing Brooks Brothers, and it has that very neat, clean sound. But when he made Big Fun, he was wearing an orange suede lace-up shirt and blue bubble sunglasses — and that’s exactly what the record sounds like.

"I’ll never make fun of a woman’s shopping for shoes or dresses again. I have more shoes than most women I know, and some of them might go unworn for a year or two just waiting for the exact moment when you need them."

Henry’s producer credit can also be found on albums by Aimee Mann, Shivaree, Teddy Thompson, Ani DiFranco, John Doe, Kristin Hersh, and, perhaps most important, Joe Henry. He’s an accomplished singer and songwriter with nine discs that bear his name. And his production career began in the service of his own music. He produced his first two albums, 1986’s Talk of Heaven and 1990’s Shuffletown, with Keith Anderson and T-Bone Burnett, and his association with Burnett, which continues, seems to have had a profound effect on how he conceives of recording.

"I think of myself as a casting director," he explains. "That’s something I learned from T-Bone, who is a master at assembling the right musicians to support the artists he records. I have a small but great pool of resources here in Los Angeles. What I try to do is think foremost of the voice that the players who make the record will be supporting, and then I try to put the right personalities in the room. Sometimes I’m not exactly sure what instrument they’ll be playing or what their exact role will be in the songs, but I wouldn’t want to make an album without them. Susan, for example, has a band she really loves, but she was trusting enough to step outside her usual environment and into the one I created for her. It was the same with Bettye. Now, Solomon, I think, was a little more skeptical. Although he was game, I think it took him a few days to believe that he didn’t need a big horn section and the other sort of classic elements of soul music that had surrounded his voice all his life. I told him, ‘Solomon, it’s going to be like you’re Sinatra, the vocalist as bandleader, and the band is going to follow you wherever you go.’ "

"That’s what I experienced working with Joe’s musicians, although it took them a day or two to really ‘get’ me," says LaVette. Listeners unfamiliar with her string of obscure recordings may be astonished to find that her emotional mastery is comparable to Aretha Franklin’s. Her voice, however, is much darker and in a sense more worldly for its raw, oaken sound. She takes her album’s 10 songs, mostly familiar numbers by contemporary writers/performers including Sinéad O’Connor ("I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got") and Dolly Parton ("Little Sparrow"), to complex places where unvarnished feelings clash like the cross-currents of ocean channels.

"My phrasing really came to me over a period of time," she says of her mesmerizing style. "I had a manger for 15 years who wasn’t concerned with recording, which might not have been such a good thing. But he told me that if I learned to develop myself as a singer and live performer and really got control of my voice, I’d be able to work for the rest of my life. That did help me survive. I’ve had nothing to show in terms of a big hit, but I’ve worked on my voice and my show continuously."

And Tedeschi explains, "I’d been writing a bunch of new songs and working on them with my band, but we were coming up against the deadline for getting my first album for Verve ready in time for its release date." Some of her energy had also been diverted into the birth and nurturing of her second child, Sofia, with her husband, Allman Brothers guitarist Derek Trucks.

"I had heard Joe’s record with Solomon, and both Derek and [Allmans and Gov’t Mule guitarist] Warren Haynes had suggested him when I was looking for possible producers, so I put my trust in him. The big deal for me was when he told me that Doyle Bramhall Jr. would be playing guitar." Indeed, the duo’s gut-bucket rendition of "The Danger Zone" — where Bramhall evokes the nasty guitar style of his hero Lightnin’ Hopkins, whose image is tattoo’d on his arm — is one of the CD’s high points and a sharp contrast to many of its other elegant-though-spare arrangements.

That sparseness, always in the service of keeping his singers to the fore, is one of Henry’s trademarks. "It’s instinctive for me to put the singer and the song forward. I’m a singer myself, and that informs my sensibility. Many producers have thought of the voice as the very last thing to go on tape, which often happened to Bettye in her career, so her performances hadn’t been respected by the very people she was forced to put her trust in. If the voice is really speaking, really saying something to you, everything else has to take its place around it. And working with people like Solomon, Bettye, Mavis, Susan and Irma . . . these are voices that have something to say, even in a sigh."


Issue Date: November 4 - 10, 2005
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