Comment on this story What: Norah Jones and the Handsome Band with Amos Lee When: Monday, Nov. 8, 8 p.m. Where: Thompson-Boling Arena Cost: $58 and $48, available at Tickets Unlimited outlets

Norah Jones gives voice to romance and simpler times

by Paige M. Travis

Fame, fortune, critical adulation—none of it seems to have fazed Norah Jones. The 24-year-old singer/pianist is sweet and adorable—capable of giggling goofiness at times—yet still a driven and successful young woman. She might be one of the only current artists in popular music adored by grandparents and successive generations of offspring alike, her discs given as gifts to mothers and lovers. Her voice is a soothing balm; sweet but not saccharin, capable but not showy. Slightly breathy, it echoes torch-song crooners of long ago.

“People were ready for heartfelt music,” says her producer Arif Mardin by way of explaining the rocket-like ascent to popularity Jones experienced soon after her first disc, Come Away With Me, came out in February 2002. Just five months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 turned Jones’ home New York City and the rest of America into a confusing, fearful place, the disc featured music that was pretty, comforting, familiar but original. At the same time, runway fashions had responded to the times by becoming lacy, pink, romantic. Doubtless, Jones didn’t intentionally participate in this trend, but her sultry voice and songs resonated with the tones of escapist romance. Perhaps the world received Norah Jones when it needed her most.

Born in 1979 in New York City, Jones was raised by her mother in a suburb of Dallas. Although she shied away from making the connection public, Jones’ father is Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, although the two were estranged for many years. Their styles are vastly dissimilar, but it’s hard not to think the talent is genetic. Jones attended a performing and visual arts high school, and for two years was a jazz piano major at the University of North Texas. But the lure of a summer in New York City ended her academic training in 1999. She waited tables and put together a band featuring songwriter/guitarist Jesse Harris, bassist Lee Alexander, and drummer Don Rieser. From this collective grew the repertoire that would form the substance of Come Away With Me.

The band recorded a demo and shopped it to Blue Note Records, a traditionally jazz-associated label whose artist roster includes, to name a very few, Chet Baker, Herbie Hancock, Charlie Hunter and Cassandra Wilson. According to industry lore, Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall signed Norah Jones to the label immediately.

While it’s conceivable that another, perhaps less savvy, label might have plucked Jones from her clan to record with or perform the songs of other players of the label’s choosing, Blue Note kept the quartet intact, adding electric guitarist Adam Levy, guitarist Kevin Breit, and additional musicians to flesh out the sound of the songs that became Come Away With Me.

After the record was released, it trickled down to radio. Even in the strictly regimented categories of commercial stations, the record’s first single and first track, the Jesse Harris-penned “Don’t Know Why,” found supporters—and listeners—through non-commercial, Triple A and even adult contemporary stations. Suddenly, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing her name. Within a month of her well-attended show at Knoxville’s Blue Cats in 2002 (where about a third of the audience paid $12 to stand near the bar and talk loudly enough to enrage the rest of the audience and irritate the band), Jones had been interviewed on National Public Radio and appeared on the cover of magazines. The record and its performers won eight Grammy Awards.

Two years later, Come Away With Me has sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, and its follow-up, 2004’s Feels Like Home, is quick on its heels.

Where Jones’ first disc positioned her as an interpreter of her friends’ and bandmates’ songs—Jesse Harris has since gone on to advance his own songwriting and performing career—Feels Like Home is more of an expression of her creative and collaborative skills. She wrote or co-wrote five of the disc’s songs, teaming mainly with bassist—and her boyfriend of five years—Lee Alexander (who contributed four songs to Come Away With Me).

Recorded again with producer Mardin, Feels Like Home retains Jones’ trademark open, mellow sound of standards that you just haven’t heard yet. More organ, strings and a wider variety of tempos give the record, at times, a darker feeling. Adam Levy’s “In the Morning” finds Jones crooning and belting like a blues singer, accompanying herself on a moody Wurlitzer electric piano. Her version of Townes Van Zandt’s “Be Here to Love Me” is a waltzy heartbreaker touched by the strains of accordion. She also tackles a song by Tom Waits, whose unique style can make his songs inseparable from him as a character and performer.

Jones met Waits at a party where he asked her if she got the songs he sent. Normally, Jones doesn’t like to be petitioned by people bringing or sending songs for her to consider performing or recording. “I appreciate it, but I really don’t like finding songs that way,” she says. But this was Tom Waits, an artist she really admires. She regretted having to tell Tom that, no, she hadn’t received the songs he sent. After the party she tracked them down at her management’s office and listened to the enclosed disc. The first song, “The Long Way Home,” Waits wrote for the soundtrack of Big Bad Love, a movie based on a short story by Mississippi writer Larry Brown.

“I just remember falling in love with the song and not wanting to change anything about it,” Jones says. “So we tried to play it the same as on the track.”

Only listeners very familiar with Waits might recognize the song as his, yet there is an intrinsic funkiness to the track.

“I sound so not like Tom Waits,” Jones says with a laugh.

The song almost wasn’t included in the final track list of Feels Like Home, but its champions won out, although Jones isn’t sure they eventually captured the best version on record. They have gotten a chance to perfect it in their live set.

“We have so much fun playing that song,” she says. “It’s got a great vibe.”

While Waits’ song wouldn’t have fit into the deep mellowness of Jones’ first record, its quirkiness finds a place on Feels Like Home and in the context of her broadening repertoire. The differences are subtle, but the latest record is more dynamic, a little more surprising.

One unexpected treat comes in the form of a guest spot by Dolly Parton on Alexander’s song “Creepin’ In,” a cute, twangy, bluegrass ditty that seems to be about water coming through the hole in your shoe.

Jones had performed with Parton during the Country Music Awards and contributed a song (“The Grass is Blue”) to the Just Because I’m a Woman tribute record. So it seemed a fair trade to ask Parton to join her in the studio for “Creepin’ In.”

“I never thought I would record with her,” says Jones, who admits to being nervous about singing with the sassy matriarch of country and bluegrass.

“We recorded the song before she came in, just in case we messed up,” she says. But their nerves didn’t interfere, allowing for an easy and successful session.

“It came about in a really natural way,” she says. “I was afraid that she’d sing so good that I’d just sound stupid. She sings her ass off on that song! But luckily our voices are so different we complemented each other.”

Dolly appears to perform the song on Jones’ upcoming new live DVD, Norah Jones and The Handsome Band: Live in 2004, to be released Nov. 16. Although the recording process at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium was a full-on production with many more cameras than the 2002 Live in New Orleans DVD, Jones and crew tried to stay as laid back as possible.

“It was a bit over the top,” she says. “But in the end we had a good show, and it really worked out.”

The DVD includes footage from the two nights of live performances, also featuring guests Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, interspersed with clips from rehearsal sessions. Jones says she was glad to have that rehearsal footage to break up the DVD’s progression because during the show, Dolly’s performance brought down the house.

“It took us about three songs to get the audience back,” she says.

Now 24, Norah Jones has racked up a laundry list of talented and internationally admired musicians that she has met and performed with. And she seems to be just as dazzled by them as many of her fans are by the beautiful young pianist with the dreamy whisper.

Although her songs contain sentiments like “I’d cry if you hurt, I’d give you my last shirt, because I love you so” and “Come away with me and I’ll never stop loving you,” Jones claims she isn’t a romantic person.

“I’m not at all,” she says, incriminating Alexander, her partner in love and songwriting. “We don’t even give each other presents. I prefer it that way. We both do. We’re bad at giving presents to other people. We’re so lame in that way.” She laughs, adding, “ We go to dinner, and we’re sweet to each other. I prefer being in a relationship that’s like this.”

Her gift-giving habits notwithstanding, Norah Jones—with her smoky voice and heartfelt songs—has become a spokesperson of sorts for romance. But if one voice can move millions, it must be true love.

November 4, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 45 © 2004 Metro Pulse