Moments before taking the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival in late July, Norah Jones paused to reflect on her ties to the tradition it represents. “Sometimes I feel like a jazz dropout, you know?” she said in her trailer, wearing a floral-print summer dress. “But whenever I’m around those people, from high school or college or my early days in New York, everybody makes me feel like part of the family.”
Jazz, or at least her homespun take on it, brought Jones one of the most decorated albums in recent history. ‘Come Away With Me’, her 2002 debut, took home eight Grammy Awards, including album of the year, and has sold over 11 million copies. She trained as a jazz pianist and singer before sidling over to the countrified folk and low-gloss pop that marked her three subsequent albums, from 2004-2009, all certified platinum. A first-time Norah Jones performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, the world’s oldest and still one of its most prestigious, was both an overdue and unforeseen event. It’s no coincidence that the festival hit maximum capacity, for the first time in more than 15 years, on the day that her name was on the bill.
Stage presence
She made the occasion a public preview of her new album, ‘Day Breaks’, which brings her back into the jazz fold without taking the safe or familiar route. Due October 7, it features prominent jazz artistes like the saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the bassist John Patitucci. And when she took the stage at Newport with several other musicians from the album, including the drummer Brian Blade, the message was clear: Rather than making some sort of prodigal return, she was accessing her musical core.
When she got to Flipside, a turbocharged new rhythm-and-blues tune, she belted the chorus but compressed just as much feeling, at a cooler temperature, into the second verse:
I finally know who I’m supposed to be / My mind was locked but I found the key / Hope it don’t all slip away from me.
A few weeks later, during a lunch interview, Jones allowed that those lyrics reflected her current state of mind. “I feel very comfortable with myself, in a way that I probably didn’t 10 years ago,” she said. “I think that’s probably what happens when you get older.” She is 37, the mother of two children: a toddler son and a daughter born several months ago. But Jones seemed well rested and at ease. And she enjoyed her Newport Jazz Festival experience: “I thought that the whole set was pretty sloppy, but loose and fun in all the right ways.”
Fifteen years ago, when Jones signed to Blue Note, a storied jazz label, she was obviously an outlier: an unproven young singer-songwriter blending acoustic jazz with rustic country and folksy soft rock. Her success set a precedent for later signings like Amos Lee, the Wood Brothers and Kandace Springs as she continued to push her sound: Her previous solo album, from 2012, is ‘Little Broken Hearts’, a pop mélange produced by Danger Mouse.
Jones happens to be angling toward jazz at a moment when its pulse can be felt through a lot of popular music: nestled in the style of hip-hop artistes like Kendrick Lamar and pop megastars like Beyoncé; in the touring bands of soul survivors like D’Angelo and Maxwell; in the bloodstream of vanguardist electronic producers like Flying Lotus; all over a valedictory recent album by David Bowie.
Core conception
But the spark for ‘Day Breaks’ can be traced to a single moment two years ago at the Kennedy Center in Washington, when Jones appeared on a 75th anniversary concert for her label and performed I’ve Got to See You Again, a smoldering tune by Jesse Harris, with a group that included Shorter, Patitucci and Blade.
“When I started thinking about making a ‘jazz record,’ mostly I was thinking about recording with Wayne and Brian,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be standards. I was hoping for something very rhythmic, with Wayne floating over the top.”
Jones has played more guitar than piano in recent years, on her own and with side projects like Puss n Boots, a vaguely tongue-in-cheek singer-songwriter trio, and the Little Willies, a springy vintage-country band. (She also mainly played guitar on ‘Foreverly’, a nod to the Everly Brothers, made several years ago with the Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong.) “I think even more than a return to jazz, it’s a return to the piano,” Jones said of ‘Day Breaks’, a point seconded by Blade, who played on her first two albums, and has also backed hall-of-fame singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.
“Norah accompanies herself like Carmen McRae or Shirley Horn — or Joni, for that matter,” Blade said by telephone. “She’s a great architect from the instrument, while listening and taking suggestions from the band.”
Jones didn’t shy away from topicality. Flipside takes issue with societal oppression and runaway gun culture. It’s a Wonderful Time for Love has a jaunty cadence but lyrics that nod toward the darkness. “I just thought, ‘The whole world’s kind of falling apart right now’,” Jones said. On tour recently, she noticed that one of her older songs, My Dear Country — written about the 2004 presidential election, but even more fitting in 2016 — struck a nerve. “It was insane,” she said. “People were flipping out.”
Jones’s fall tour will feature her regular working band, and bring her to the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on November 29. But she’ll also play four nights, October 10-13, in a small theatre at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street, with the same special-edition jazz crew that joined her in Newport.
With luck, her tour will include the standout Neil Young cover she included on ‘Day Breaks’ — a deep cut called Don’t Be Denied, from 1973. Its lyrics are autobiographically raw, and to connect with them Jones changed the point of view from ‘I’ to ‘she’. His Winnipeg also becomes her Anchorage, in accordance with her own childhood story, which included a trip from Texas to Alaska and back with her mother. (Her father, the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar, was a distant presence in her life.)
The song is about bitter disillusionment, and the hard-fought wisdom that casts a skeptical eye on the meaning of commercial success. The chorus consists entirely of the title phrase: ‘Don’t be denied.’ Jones sings it a total of 19 times, making it sound both like a reassurance and a battle cry.
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