Clint Holmes: ‘James, Joni, and Me’
54 Below
September 20

He’s seen fire, and he’s seen rain. He’s seen sunny days that he thought would never end. And the way Clint Holmes sings that song, he makes me feel like I’m hearing it for the first time,

There’s a reason why folk songs — both the traditional kind and those written by more contemporary singer-songwriters in the folk vein — are only rarely performed by jazz artists. Jazz musicians and singers are looking for a different kind of harmony, one that goes to the upper intervals of the chord, and they prefer a more complex, yet swinging rhythm. That bar is raised even higher in bebop and modern jazz. 

Yet one area we don’t talk about enough is dynamics; Folk singers sing in an even monotone; their chief asset is simplicity and understatement. In James Taylor’s iconic 1970 premiere recording of “Fire and Rain,” he delivers the lyrics deliberately flatly — like he wants to get out of the way of his own words, as if any level of interpretation would distract from the text rather than enhance it.

Contrastingly, jazz and jazz-influenced pop singers use a wide dynamic range — none more so than the great Tony Bennett, who was equally inspired in this area by Count Basie and Judy Garland.  They knew when to whisper and when to shout.  

When Clint Holmes sings the folk-inspired songs of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor this week at 54 Below, he’s using the harmony, rhythm, and especially the dynamics of a Bennett or an Ella Fitzgerald.  

Mr. Holmes starts “Fire and Rain” slowly and quietly, like Frank Sinatra doing “Ol’ Man River,” accompanied only by pianist and musical director Demetrios Pappas. At first, it’s more like he’s thinking to himself — it’s all internal — rather than singing out loud, as if in a conversation with a departed friend. You know she’s not actually there, but you keep talking to her anyway. 

He gradually builds, and is joined by guitarist Peter Calo, bassist Lavondo Thomas, and drummer Jakubu Griffin. By the second verse, he’s praying openly, as if kneeling in church, beseeching Jesus to cast his eyes downward upon him. Soon, he’s communicating in an increasingly loud, declamatory tone, as if he’s getting angrier and angrier, about how friends can leave — not always of their own accord — and not be there when you need them, how “sweet dreams” can lead to bitter disappointments, how “flying machines,” those best laid plans of mice and men, often wind up “in pieces on the ground.”

By the third and final chorus, he’s at the top of his lungs. He not only wants the whole world to feel his anger and frustration, but he’s at full volume, confronting God Himself. It’s less like a simple folk song and more like the most profound poetry of William Blake: The Creator was benevolent enough to bestow upon us such miracles as rain and fire, but even He is powerless to protect us from that kind of pain.

“Fire and Rain” was a highlight of Wednesday’s performance, but his readings of what might be Joni Mitchell’s two most-performed songs, at least in jazz and cabaret circles — “Both Sides Now” and “A Case of You” — were equally profoundly moving; he transformed both into powerful, internally-directed soliloquies. There was irony and bittersweet humor in two Mitchell classics with automotive metaphors, “Traffic Jam” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” as well as in a self-mocking “Mean Old Man” recast as a jazz waltz.

The crowd sang along, invited on “Shower the People” and uninvited on “How Sweet It Is,” and he closed with a philosophical ode of his own composition, “If Not Now, When.”

We’re fortunate to live in a world where iconic singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Short have given us definitive songbooks of the pantheonic composers of the interwar era, like Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and Rodgers & Hart. In this moment, we need Mr. Holmes to record equally ambitious songbook albums growing out of the shows he’s done of Paul Simon, Peter Allen, and now Mr. Taylor and Ms. Mitchell, not to mention Jimmy Webb, Paul Williams, Billy Joel, Carole King, and many others.

No one interprets this music as powerfully as Clint Holmes, who often brings both a specificity as well as an objective perspective that even the original authors can’t match. In Mr. Holmes’s rendering, even more than Mr. Taylor’s, the symbols of fire and rain mean something totally different at the end of the song that they did at the beginning. For the first time, I realized that the reason he will never see her again is not because they’ve parted, but because she has moved on to the next world.  

Clint Holmes has seen everything in his 79 years, both the fire and the rain, and he’s still caught up in the wonder of it all.