Joy Of Cooking – Self-Titled

A husband in Europe on business, the children off to school and another long day ahead. She stares blankly out the window bathed in morning sunlight, a glass of white wine in her hand; a vague sense of disappointment pervades. She reflects, “The life that I’ve fashioned is not what I wanted.” It’s the stuff of countless made-for-TV movies, but in the early 1970s, before the women’s movement’s inevitable co-optation and commodification, such scenarios signaled the rumblings of genuine awakening.

Unfortunately, over the past 30-odd years, Joy Of Cooking’s once notable rep has suffered a similar diminution, from critical darlings to rock ‘n’ roll footnotes. Led by a pair of Berkeley over-30s — Toni Brown, a folkie with a penchant for abstract jazz, and Terry Garthwaite, a white blues mama with a more-than-creditable scat — Joy Of Cooking’s stylistic marriage portends the worst sort of middlebrow pretension. But in practice, the partnership functions much like the old Astaire-Rodgers axiom, with Brown providing the class and Garthwaite the sex.

Given their unlikely roots, their self-titled debut’s decidedly adult, obliquely feminist slant is more a function of nature than design: memories of abiding love, rearranging a bedroom to forestall failed romance, finding one’s wings and moving on. But as Brown and Garthwaite have long argued, Joy Of Cooking’s primary impulse is musical, not political — their band name is not simply a reclamation of tired domestic trope, but also an acknowledgment of the physical pleasures of making music.

With Brown’s flowing piano lines foregrounded and secret weapon Ron Wilson’s percussion percolating deep in the mix, Joy Of Cooking showcases a dance band’s commitment to rhythmic interplay. Together, the group fashions a genuine feminine jam-band alternative: pretty, sexy and playful; organic without the bullshit; long on groove and short on pointless shows of chops. A unjustly forgotten gem.