Norah Jones

:. e-mail this article :. print this article :. comment on this article

Who is barely over five feet tall, 26 years old, and sells 10 million albums before you can blink? Hint: It's not Kelly Clarkson.

Of course, every record executive in the world can tell you that Norah Jones is their American Idol: an out-of-nowhere artist who records her albums for next to nothing and then seems to appeal to every demographic short of head-banger. Sure, you got sick of "Come Away with Me", and Norah smelled like a one-hit wonder from 300 yards, but then what was she doing on the 2005 Grammy Awards telecast, sharing "Record of the Year" glory with no less than Brother Ray Charles for "Here We Go Again" and then picking up "Best Female Pop Performance" for "Sunrise," from her second album, Feels Like Home?

Norah Jones, tiny as she is, is not going away. And record producers are thinking: "How can I get me a Norah Jones?" Ever since she became the music story of 2003 -- a drastic break from the Britney teen-pop phenomenon and proof that (a) adults still bought records and (b) subtlety and "craft" could still count in pop music -- the industry has been trying to clone her.

Okay, so how do you clone a fluke? Norah was a 22-year-old pianist out of the North Texas State jazz program with a keen singing voice. Blue Note, the venerable jazz label, signed her to make a collection of mid-tempo pop-jazz that might sell 50,000 copies if lightning struck. Millions? No way.

On the other hand, the boffo success of someone like Norah Jones may have been inevitable. While Norah was still in grade school, the beginning of a "young fogy" movement -- young singers who seemed to base their styles on the past and therefore were appealing to both young and older fans -- was taking hold. Harry Connick, Jr. had a very successful album in 1987 that featured a distinctly Sinatra-esque version of "Our Love Is Here to Stay". Though much of the rest of the album was clearly instrumental jazz (Monk's "I Mean You" and a version of "On Green Dolphin Street"), Connick, with some good looks and hair grease, had a career. At almost the same time, another young instrumentalist who could play jazz started making records with the occasional vocal. Though he modeled himself more after Nat Cole, John Pizzarelli was working a similar vein of non-nostalgic older music. With 1992's All of Me on RCA, Pizzarelli was actually crooning before a credible swing band, selling well by jazz standards but not like a pop star.

So, record executives have no doubt been saying in their plush New York and L.A. suites, Norah was not such a fluke. Like Norah, Connick and Pizzarelli both fall into the marketing haze between jazz and pop music. Like Jones, they started out as jazz instrumentalists -- with grounding in improvisation, chords, song forms, and jazz history -- whose success was ignited by charismatic singing. Somewhere in there, the exec's have been thinking, is the formula. "Get me a jazz singer. But not too jazzy. Young. Good looking. Heh-heh", the executive chuckles, "the streets are teeming with them, right? Sign 'em all!"

And so they have. A partial list would include artists such as Amos Lee, Tierney Sutton, Lizz Wright, Karrin Allyson, Nellie McKay, Erin Bode, Michael Buble, Jane Monheit, and Jamie Cullum. While these artists are not all post-Norah signings, they've all being marketed as potential Norahs. But hitting the jackpot twice is not easy.

The trick, it seems, is to carefully balance the jazz content of the music with a non-jazz pop sensibility. Or, put another way, to mix just enough jazz into a pop artist's bag to give it the Norah spark. NPR listeners and jazz fans are drawn in, but the reg'lar folks ain't scared off by crazy saxophone solos. You cultivate some confusion, just like Norah and her predecessors have.

The indispensable Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, for example, reviews the Pizzarelli albums with affection, granting most of them three or three-and-half stars. Harry Connick does not appear in the book at all. It seems almost axiomatic that artists recording for Blue Note Records are "jazz", yet Norah doesn't make the Penguin guide (where Morton and Cook write that "the jazz content of the music which has been marketed primarily to pop audiences is at best modest"). Her female counterpoint, perhaps, is pianist singer Diana Krall, who is no less aggressively marketed to pop audiences, who records for jazz label Verve, but who the Guide reviews generously -- including her latest release, The Girl in the Other Room, which is stocked with originals, some co-written with Krall's rocker husband Elvis Costello.

For the Penguin guide, the question, of course, is: what is jazz? And particularly, what is "jazz singing"? Sure: Pops Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, but the general case is hard to set out. Some improvise by scatting (Ella), but most don't (Billie). Jazz singing would seem to place a primary focus on freely interpreting songs -- particularly a certain group of "standard repertoire" songs -- yet singers who do this brilliantly such as Frank Sinatra may not really be considered "jazz" singers. Jazz fans can play the Potter Stewart "I know when I see it" game all day -- Sinatra, no; Mel Torme, yes -- Patty Page, no; Anita O'Day yes -- Betty Carter and Eddie Jefferson, certainly; Mario Lanza and Doris Day, certainly not.

But, in the end, "jazz singing" is even less well defined than jazz itself. As much as anything, it would seem to be a matter of association and, yes, marketing, which brings us back to Norah and the record companies. The money and the fluky formula for Norah's success would seem to be in the grey area. Norah probably was a jazz singer until it dawned on Bruce Lundvall at Blue Note that it was possible for her to be popular. Norah suggested to every record executive in the free world that the public was interested again in a style of non-rock singing that has, at least, the flavor of jazz.

Needless to say, I am hugely cynical about this. It's all driven by money, of course (what isn't?), but that doesn't mean that the creative side effects of the search for The Next Norah are a bad thing. Norah and her ilk are bringing back to pop music some of the nuance and phrasing of jazz, and they're putting jazz singers in a position to interpret material beyond the usual Tin Pan Alley "standards".

Jamie Cullum, a young British pianist-singer who released his debut on Verve a year ago, is doing both those things. His "Blame It on My Youth" is cool, his "I Get a Kick Out of You" has almost a rock level of energy, but then his versions of tunes by Radiohead and Jimi Hendrix -- interpreted by a trio of acoustic piano, acoustic bass, and drums -- expand the jazz repertoire nicely. And despite his Bobby Darin-on-speed vocals, his piano solos are more modern (in the vein of Chick Corea or McCoy Tyner) than anything Diana Krall lays down.

Nellie McKay, with her double-disc on Columbia, is the most post-modernly eclectic of the group. She affects older band singers like Doris Day at times, hip-cutesies like Blossom Dearie at others, but then she'll pull off a rap so clever and rhythmically interesting that she can site Eminem as an influence. Titling her album Get Away From Me was brilliant -- both a gauntlet thrown down to Norah and a reminder of who she's selling records to. Unlike most of the Norah Nexts, Nellie can write some great tunes, and in that sense she also evokes the Godmother of pseudo-jazz pop stardom: Joni Mitchell.

Amos Lee comes from the other side of the spectrum. Though he's been signed by Blue Note, he sounds more like a folk-soul artist in the Bill Withers vein than a jazz singer. But his band isNorah's band, and guess who's guesting on vocal harmonies on a couple of tracks? And, oh yeah, he's been opening for her in concert. Like Norah's records, this almost aggressively pleasant disc has an entirely uniform mood of grooving mellowness. And it would be easy enough to dislike the calculation of it all -- "Amos Lee: The Male Norah!" -- if the guy wasn't such a fantastically soulful singer.

The other recent disc that has Jones fingerprints all over it is the soon-to-be-released second disc by soul chanteuse Lizz Wright. Dreaming Wide Awake contains two songs penned by Jesse Harris, the writer who propelled Norah's debut into the stratosphere. Like almost all these records, Dreaming is stocked with two-three minute pop tunes that could get radio play if the dice break right and that certainly will sound good in your local Starbucks. Again, the whole thing is decidedly calculated, but it's the kind of calculation of which we need more. Each of these records is under- rather than over-produced -- no cheesy string sections, no bogus soaring ballads, no out of place rock guitar or funk bass. Don't we need more well written songs interpreted by soulful or jazz-tinged vocalists?

What the Next Norah movement lacks, however, is the spark of originality, the little piece of grit in the bottom of the oyster that forms the pearl. Lizz Wright's new disc wittingly points listeners to the real thing. Before Norah sounded the jackpot bells for EMI, there was a singer doing many of the same things -- combining folk and country with jazz, interpreting "new standards", and finding an original way to plant the seed of jazz in a pop garden. In 1993, the acclaimed jazz singer Cassandra Wilson recorded her first album for Blue Note, Blue Light 'Til Dawn with the production help of Craig Street -- the producer of Dreaming Wide Awake. Together, Street and Wilson conceived of a new band sound for Ms. Wilson, getting rid of the piano-based jazz sound and encasing her contralto in acoustic guitars, percussion and ethereally contrary song choices: Robert Johnson, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell. The follow-up disc, New Moon Daughter, was even better, showing how Ms. Wilson could be equally successful with songs by Billie Holiday, U2, Hoagy Carmichael, Neil Young, Hank Williams, and -- seriously -- The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville".

By jazz standards, New Moon Daughter was a hit, but Ms. Wilson's dark chocolate voice, her penchant for bold interpretive choices, and her allegiance to a significant degree of improvisation have kept her on the jazz side of the fence. While Time magazine named her "America's Best Singer" in a 2001 article, she remains the flip side of the Norah coin -- showing a way to follow the same path but without the same calculation or compromise. Lizz Wright's new record sounds eerily like a Cassandra Wilson recording while still aping Norah, a sign that this new kind of jazz-pop singing is still finding its center.

In the end, it's hard to know if this is more a movement in jazz -- expanding its range of songs and stylistic possibilities -- or a movement toward a new kind of sophisticated pop. It may be both. After all, there was a time when pop music was jazz, when the hippest singers were also the most popular, when the elastic swing of jazz propelled feet as well as toes. But with the dominance of hip-hop, the fragmentation of the music audience, and the current distance of real jazz from the cultural center, it's hard to imagine another pop superstar who will be listed in the Penguin Guide.