Singer-songwriter Vince Bell finds a new focus with ‘Ojo’
Vince Bell went off script with his fourth album, “Ojo.” Over the years, Bell had made a space for himself among the great singersongwriters from Texas, who almost all worked from a folk foundation. With this record, though, he embraced the idea of improvisation, creating a sphere of jazz-minded folk music that offers few reference points.
“It has a shelf life like nothing else,” Bell says. “Which is a pretty exciting place to be. Enlivening, too.”
The album has connections to Bell’s first release, but there’s a bit of story getting there.
Bell was a fixture in Houston’s songwriter scene in the ’70s and early ’80s, and was in the process of making a debut recording when he was broadsided in 1982 by a drunken driver. He suffered brain and spine injuries, and one of his hands had to be rebuilt. Bell essentially had to relearn how to live. Having done that, he set about relearning to make music.
Bell made “Phoenix” with Bob Neuwirth, a music veteran and longtime Bob Dylan associate.
Even back in 1995, Neuwirth felt something in Bell’s lyrics. He wanted to steer the songwriter toward a weird lyrical jazz recording. Nearly a quarter century later, he did.
Bell relished the opportunity to write in a different manner. After our conversation, he writes me at length about improvisational writing:
“About love, about work, about mom, about someone else’s mom, about the weather, about the state of the world. Improv is a surprise, improv is a novelty, improv is hard work done lifetimes ago. Improv flows from your experience, improv flows like a river, improv gathers like a cloud, improv stops on a dime,
improv moves like a cat, improv runs like a horse, improv flies like a bird, improv swims like a fish, like a school of fish swimming through a reef, improv stands like a soldier.”
Bell always had strong poetic inclinations among Texas songwriters. Neuwirth called “Ojo” “the gateway to his world.”
Some of the songs, such as “If You Walk Away,” veer a little closer to what you’d call Americana with Bell singing. Others lean more toward recitation, like the opener, “A Little Poetry,” which is an ethereal piece of writing recited with only a continuum fingerboard as musical accompaniment. “The Snake” is darker and more meditative and shape-shifting: a mesmerizing piece of opaque writing.
Most of the songs started as improvisational writing exercises:
Bell giving himself a brief window to meditate with words that run from 400 to 1,000 in number.
“For me, it was the beachhead,” he says. “It was a new perspective, a new place. This idea of pulling things out of the dictionary between my two ears.
And then looking back and realizing there’s still a story being told there. Does it all make sense? Who cares?
“I’ve discovered this thing and can’t get away from it now. It’s part of my everyday routine as a musician.”
The record slipped out quietly last year without much support from Bell. Those who know him were aware he was tending to his wife, Sarah, who was ill. She’d been a stabilizing and inspiring force in the second phase of his career, after the accident.
“I had to put a lot of music and career things on hold,” he says. “I had to take care of things at home. The idea of playing music or doing promotion, it just didn’t make sense.”
She died in February. Bell doesn’t say much about it, though clearly there’s a big empty space
that likely will fuel future improvisational sessions.
And “Ojo” has enjoyed a little belated attention. The veteran jazz writer Dan Oulette called it “the most overlooked album of 2018.” Bell returns to his old stomping grounds this week. He’ll attend a screening of “For the Sake of the Song,” a documentary about the songwriter haven Anderson Fair, at Rice University on Thursday. Then Saturday night, Bell will play the Fair, a stage he knows well.
“I’m looking forward to cutting loose with it,” he says. “It seemed like a simple idea. I could’ve made another Americana album. But I’d already done that. Why not go out and try something new?”