Pop Reviews : Rickie Lee Jones Plugs Into Standards

Rickie Lee Jones is getting the most radio airplay she’s gotten in years right now. Unfortunately, most of it is for her contribution to an alternative dance tune, the Orb’s “Fluffy Little Clouds,” and not for her own superlative new album, “Pop Pop,” a jazzy and admittedly not-so-radio-ready collection of personalized standards from decades past.

The faithful were still out in force for her top-drawing, top-drawer show Thursday night at Royce Hall. Jones sang almost all of “Pop Pop” amid generous helpings of her best original selections, some of which now count as idiosyncratic classics.

In past years before Jones made an album of this material, her surprise dips into pop/jazz standards often counted as the highlights of her sometimes free-wheeling concerts. This time around, the forays into Tin Pan Alley were the most predictable element of the show, given that Jones didn’t venture outside the new album’s choices for covers or play with the recorded arrangements to any marked degree. What was nicest, instead, was the treatment given the eight numbers from her own back catalogue, played by the same sort of acoustic band heard on “Pop Pop.”

The set--with its overhead living-room lamp, distorted-perspective window panes and low-wattage lighting--had “MTV Unplugged” written all over it. Everyone’s doing it, but Jones is better equipped to cultivate this kind of naturalistic aura than almost anyone else, having funkily straddled the line between uptown chanteuse and low-life bohemian chronicler well before the coffeehouse generation rose again.

Stark highlights utilizing only part of Jones’ crack five-man band included “Coolsville” with sax and cello and her own rattling-from-the-abdomen howl, and a definitive version of the Jefferson Airplane’s “Comin’ Back to Me” with its high, wispy vocal finale.

Jones was also scheduled to play a smaller gig celebrating her birthday Friday at the Roxy.