The Subtlety Of Norah Jones

By Phillip Lutz I Jun. 19, 2020

During the past 18 years, Norah Jones has collaborated with musicians from a range of different genres.
(Photo: Diane Russo)

Along with the obvious upsides, she said, the pressures of sudden fame became clear after the 2002 release of the album: “I just wasn’t happy that year. I was really busy and had a lot of weird family fame stuff with my dad [late sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar] that was not pleasant—having my relationship with my dad examined publicly, doing a lot of interviews.

“But I realized at a certain point that the record had taken on a life of its own and I didn’t have to keep pushing it. I stopped doing everything the label wanted me to do—pushing it and pushing it. It’s almost like going on a campaign or something. It’s too much. Then I got to focus on playing music and I had a ball.”

The ups and downs of fame, she added, “caused me to step back and think about why I’m doing this, what I want to do with all this sudden good fortune—I’m not talking only about money—and I realized that if I’m making music, then I’m happy making music. If I’m not happy making music, then I need to change things.”

In a sense, things did change: She blossomed as a composer. She wrote or co-wrote just three songs on her first album, but that number doubled on her second disc, 2004’s Feels Like Home. By the release of 2007’s Not Too Late, she said, “I was really depressed, and it felt like the world was falling apart—not my world, the world”; by 2009’s The Fall, she “had just gone through a big breakup.” But she wrote or co-wrote all the tracks on both albums.

The period of 2004–2009 yielded a parade of offerings drawing on country, folk and pop influences underpinned by a sense of jazz phraseology. The work paralleled that of another project Jones was developing: the piano-less band Puss N Boots. Though she, Dobson and Popper all regard that project as a vehicle for fun, they are fully focused on it when the time comes.

“Anything I’m involved in, I’m 100 percent involved, for the moment,” Jones said. “When we’re doing Puss N Boots, it’s my most exciting thing ever.”

The group felt a jolt of excitement on March 5, when they performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, not long before the show suspended in-studio production because of the pandemic. Jones frequently has appeared on TV over the years, and Dobson was well aware that her bandmate’s name helped secure the gig.

“A lot of our opportunities are a product of the resources that come with working with a celebrity,” Dobson said.

On camera, there was no hint of Jones’ pulling rank as they performed an easygoing mini-set of Tom Petty’s “Angel Dream” and the group-authored title track from their new album, Sister (Blue Note), released on Feb. 14. Jones chipped in with a modest electric-guitar solo on “Sister,” while Popper held the bottom on electric bass and Dobson provided laid-back propulsion on drums. But all contributed vocals, and the close harmony—in every sense of the word—was the true star.

The egalitarian dynamic apparent on-camera has been the norm off-camera, too. Dobson, who hung with Jones before and after Come Away With Me—gigging casually with her as a duo along the way—said their relationship remained remarkably unchanged, despite Jones’ acquired fame. Popper, who completed the trio as the designated bassist in 2008, said that before appearing on Fallon’s show, they worked through tunes in haunts like Sunny’s Bar in Brooklyn: “Norah takes her career very seriously. But she enjoys life and lets her hair down. We’re not fancy people—there’s a lot of equanimity.”

Back at Bar Bruno, that just-folks attitude prevailed. Dressed casually in jeans, a T-shirt and a denim jacket—and blissfully unaware that the café soon would be restricted to take-out, Sunny’s Bar would close indefinitely and she would be performing online instead of on concert stages—Jones was asked what grand plan she might have for the future.

“I’m doing it,” she said. DB

This story originally was published in the June 2020 issue of DownBeat. Subscribe here.