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Of everything written about Grace Jones, few have captured the Jamaican-American icon’s once-in-a-millennium presence quite as accurately, or compactly, as Lynn Norment, who in a July 1979 Ebony profile of the star described the then-still-ascendant Jones as “a question mark followed by an exclamation point.” Some of that question mark’s attendant mist has cleared in the ensuing five decades, inevitably cut through by the granting of interviews and the embarking upon of both a memoir and an authorized documentary. But the often-imitated-but-never-duplicated singularity of this androgynous, commandingly voiced, nearly 6 feet tall, assertively stylish, coolly cosmopolitan disco legend and film star mightly endures, its associated thrills unfaded.

Jones is most closely linked to the 1970s and ‘80s, the decades across which she transformed from an in-demand fashion model to the artistic multihyphenate we know today. But as her show at Seattle’s Moore Theatre Wednesday night attested, Jones’ best days aren’t trailing behind her. Jones has eluded the amber trapping many of her immediate peers for lots of reasons. Most immediately pinpointable, though, is how her best and most definitive music is evocative of its time and place without sounding quite like anything either then or now, and how she so much does not look or move like a 74 (or 70)-year-old that, from my balcony vantage, it seemed less like I was watching a legacy artist and more that I was watching someone still living amid their imperial run. Jones isn’t timeless: she seems to move outside of time entirely.

Read the full review on 425.