By David Okamoto, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX –
[Cut from Norah Jones "Come Away With Me": "Don't Know Why"]
Anyone who thinks beauty is only skin-deep has never heard Norah Jones sing. "Come Away With Me," the debut CD by this 22-year-old graduate of Dallas' Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, stands as a captivating testament to the power of nuance, the impact of subtlety. Jones blends jazz, folk, country and blues into a breathtaking style that's impossible to categorize. She can make a country weeper like Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart" sound like a swing number, or lovely ballads by New York songwriters Jesse Harris and Lee Alexander sound like timeless standards.
Her presence is comforting yet commanding, her phrasing whispered yet assured. Playing piano and singing with an acoustic trio, she comes across as Nina Simone with a sweet tooth, Billie Holiday with a hopeful heart, a nightingale with a siren's soul.
[Cut from Norah Jones "Come Away With Me": "Come Away with Me"]
Oddly, Jones' passion for music is derived not from her estranged father - who happens to be Ravi Shankar - but from her mother Sue Jones, who raised her in Grapevine, Texas after leaving New York in 1983 to be closer to her Oklahoma family. Her mom's record collection was steeped in '60s soul and R&B, but in junior high, Jones stumbled onto a hidden stash of Billie Holiday's early Columbia LPs and discovered jazz. While attending Booker T. Washington, she was honored by Down Beat magazine's prestigious Student Music Awards and had finished her sophomore year at the University of North Texas when a 1999 summer vacation in New York City turned into her big break.
Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note Records, saw her perform at the Knitting Factory nightclub and after financing a six-song demo tape, offered her a contract. Given the recent success of Diana Krall and Jane Monheit, Jones' Cinderella-like trajectory could be linked to the emergence of the modern-day jazz chanteuse, whose soaring altos and plunging necklines guarantee magazine covers but also cast suspicions on whether their success is based more on the marketing than the music.
But Jones, who admirably avoids overselling both her lyrics and her sexuality, refuses to rely on predictable Tin Pan Alley classics and Gershwin standards, preferring sparseness to sparkle, the thrill of discovery to the bonds of tradition. Like Simone and Cassandra Wilson, her forte is tapping into the gut-level emotion stirred up by the simplest of images.
[Cut from Norah Jones "Come Away With Me": "Turn Me On"]
The risk of heaping so much praise on a newcomer, let alone one with Dallas roots, is that it can be dismissed as boosterism or hype. But listen to "Come Away With Me" and you'll come away with the same conclusion: Norah Jones is the real deal.
[Cut from Norah Jones "Come Away With Me": "Lonestar"]
More on Norah Jones from All Songs Considered: http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/#jones
David Okamoto is senior producer of entertainment at Yahoo Broadcast, and a contributing editor to ICE magazine.