Grace Jones: Uncompromising, charismatic and iconic
Grace Jones is a towering and boundary-breaking figure in pop culture. On Saturday, July 5, she will take the new main stage at Kongsberg Jazz Festival, Kvarten.
“Grace Jones. Grace f****** Jones. That should be enough, but just in case you need more…”, it is said in her own artist biography, penned by legendary British music journalist Paul Morley. It's a timely way to describe her, but we'll have to fill in the picture a little more.
Buy tickets for the Grace Jones concert here.
Rock and roll and surrealism
One of Grace Jones' trademarks is her theatrical and innovative stage shows. Whether she performs in a cage, dances with a rocking chair while singing, or dons surreal costumes, she transforms concerts into holistic art experiences.
Grace Jones has enchanted Norwegian audiences several times with such performances, and now it is finally possible to see her, 77 years old, in free expression with Laagen as a backdrop on our new main stage, Kvarten.
In 2016, she stepped in as a headliner at the Øya Festival and the concert was described as "a visual and musical masterpiece" by Dagbladet's reviewer.
Dagsavisen's music critic Geir Rakvaag was at the same concert, and reported that he "I've seen her a few times over the years, and she's never done a stage show as good as this. The costume changes are numerous, the headdresses increasingly elaborate, and her top – is it just tight-fitting, or simply painted on her?"In the end, he concluded that the concert was "pop history in the making."
As recently as Bergenfest in 2022, the audience got to experience Grace Jones' "unwavering charisma and ability to hold the audience in the palm of his hand", according to Music News.
Towering presence
Grace Jones has always been shrouded in a mystique of her own, both musically and as a fashion icon. And on the big screen. Some of us may have first become acquainted with her enigmatic appearance in the role of Zula in Conanthe 1984 film, or as May Day in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (the one with the Duran Duran song on the soundtrack) in 1985, and delved into her incomparable hybrid music afterwards.
Regardless of your perspective on Grace Jones' career, it's hard to argue with her charisma and uncompromising nature, and that she has moved between different scenes and pop cultural expressions with a rather unique integrity.
Her presence has been, to say the least, towering, and still is, in the sixth decade since she made a splash in the not particularly timid avant-garde fashion community in Paris in the early 70s and her debut album with Portfolio in 1977, the title a clear nod to the fashion world's preferred resume format.
From Jamaica to the world stage
Grace Jones was born in Jamaica in 1948. As a teenager, she moved to Syracuse, New York. She was raised in a strict Pentecostal upbringing, which she later came to terms with. After studying theater at Syracuse University, she began a modeling career that took her to Paris. Her androgynous, striking appearance was quickly picked up by designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Thierry Mugler.
But her ambitions extended beyond the catwalk. In the late 1970s, she moved into music, signing with Island Records in the midst of the label's golden age. She first embraced the explosively growing disco scene, but her early records reveal a versatile and all-encompassing musical approach, with clear ramifications towards reggae, gospel, jazz, fusion and electronic music, among others.
Buy tickets for the Grace Jones concert here.
Breakthrough on record and canvas
In the early 1980s, the artistic breakthrough came with the albums Warm Leatherette (1980) and night clubbing (1981). Produced by the legendary reggae rhythm section Sly & Robbie, Jones moved towards a fusion of reggae, new wave and electronic music, represented by major hits such as "Pull Up to the Bumper" and "I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango)".
The Island Records era culminated with the Trevor Horn-produced concept album Slave To The Rhythm in 1985 and the compilation album Island Life in 1985, the latter adorned by the iconic photo from 1977, taken by the photographer and her then-boyfriend Jean-Paul Goude for New York Magazine, in which Jones, practically naked and glistening, strikes a pose that is anatomically impossible to pull off.
Goude manipulated a much less impressive pose in a sophisticated cut-and-paste exercise, years before Photoshop made it a little easier. But even artificial intelligence couldn't pull it off with the same elegance as the photographer's manual touch. (More on this here .) At the same time, this very image contributed greatly to her iconic, mythical and almost otherworldly position in pop culture.
"...Should Have Been a Jazz Musician"
Since she will be playing at the jazz festival in Kongsberg, we also have to mention the single "Victor Should Have Been a Jazz Musician", taken from the album Inside story (1986), produced with Nile Rodgers in the midst of his most active and ubiquitous pop period, and featuring Tower of Power saxophonist Lenny Pickett and trumpeter Mac Gollehon (known from David Bowie's "Let's Dance") in the brass section.
Grace Jones' lasting legacy and influence
Decades after her debut, Grace Jones still stands out as relevant, uncompromising, charismatic and iconic. She steps onto any stage and into any context with the same authority as in Paris in the early 70s, or in New York's fierce Studio 54 era a few years later. Or as the relatively sinister May Day in the James Bond film in the mid-80s, for that matter. She "takes the room", as they say. So too as recently as 2022, when she guested on the song "Move" on Beyonce's Renaissance-album.
Her work, across genres, disciplines and decades, amounts to one of the most extraordinary careers in pop culture. When she takes the stage at Kongsberg Jazz Festival's new arena Kvarten this summer, the audience will have a rare opportunity to experience an artist who has time and again redefined what it means to be iconic.
Buy tickets for the Grace Jones concert here.
Sources:
The Guardian, The daily newspaper, Dagbladet, Music news, Vogue, Far Out Magazine, with the BBC, A Sustainable Closet, The Press, WVAU, Post-Punk Monk.
Everything you need to know about the new Kvarten stage
