Norah Jones was an unknown singing in a New York cafe until Blue Note's Bruce Lundvall came along. He talks to John Casey about what he heard
When Bruce Lundvall got a message that a woman in accounts was looking for him, his first thought was that he had another royalty payment problem to smooth over. The boss of Blue Note records, the legendary jazz label owned by EMI, phoned her back immediately. But Shell White, an accounts executive, didn't want to talk numbers. She wanted Lundvall to meet Norah, a young singer she and her jazz musician husband had heard singing to brunchers in a local New York cafe.
It was the sort of request he had received dozens of times before, but Lundvall suggested she drop by anyway. In doing so, he unwittingly set in train a sequence of events that in just two years have turned an unknown 21-year-old waitress into one of the most critically-acclaimed musical acts in the world.
Five days after White's first call, a wide-eyed Norah Jones was sitting nervously in Lundvall's office, gazing in awe at walls covered in signed photos of music legends such as Duke Ellington and Ray Charles, while a crackly three-song demo played in the background.
"I was blown away, totally blown away," recalls Lundvall. "Sat in front of me was this very shy little girl in glasses, fresh out of university, who had the most extraordinary voice. I said to her 'we gotta get you an attorney because I'm going to sign you to Blue Note records right now'. She didn't know what to say."
Last Sunday night, Jones was again lost for words, as her début album picked up a remarkable five Grammys - the musical equivalent of the Oscars - in front of almost 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden. The awards, including album of the year, best new artist and best female pop vocal performance were for Come Away With Me, a soulful, smoky album that has led critics to draw comparisons with Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.
Released last February, only days after she hung up her waitress apron for the last time, it has already sold almost eight million copies worldwide. In Ireland, it has sold over 65,000 copies and is currently at number one in the album charts.
"We knew she had tremendous appeal but this is a kind of success we never dreamed of," says Lundvall. A 42-year veteran of the industry, he has worked with everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Miles Davis, but Jones is on a different scale. In a year, he says, she has sold more records than any other artist in Blue Note's history.
"After so much electronic, teeny music and hip-hop the public was hungry for something different. Norah had a signature sound that was just that." The afternoon after the Grammys' ceremony, the phones at Blue Note were ringing non stop. As an increasingly harassed PA fielded calls from newspapers chasing interviews with the sleep-deprived Man Behind Norah, Lundvall tried to gather his thoughts.
"Is this really happening? Tell me it's real," he laughs as he slumps into the leather chair behind his desk.
Then Carlos Santana, the guitar legend and an old friend, is put through. "Carlos has written a song for Norah and wants to perform with her. He thinks she is incredible," Lundvall says after the call.
The impact of Jones's awards on EMI's fragile finances is likely to be significant. Grammy awards spark hundreds of thousands of new sales, and EMI executives believe the album could end up shifting 11 million copies - their biggest success since the Beatles 1 compilation album of two years ago. A DVD of her performing recently in New Orleans is due to be released in early March.
A further boost to the money men is Jones's abhorrence of flashy videos or heavy marketing.
"When sales of the record passed the one million mark she came to me and asked if we could stop selling it," says Lundvall. "She didn't want people burning out on it and becoming bored. I had to persuade her that there were millions of people out there who wanted to pay to hear music that she had produced totally on her own terms."
She also refused point blank to allow the EMI marketing department to release a remixed version of her hit Don't Know Why to radio stations. "It was an up-tempo thing with some of the lyrics repeated and the minute she heard it she said she didn't want anything to do with it," Lundvall says.
Instead she just wants to concentrate on the music in her genes. The product of a nine-year relationship between Sue Jones, a New York concert producer, and the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, she grew up listening to artists ranging from George Jones to Maria Callas. As a young girl, she and her mother moved to Texas and she later studied piano and theory at the University of North Texas. By the time she arrived at Blue Note, Jones had more than 1,000 hours of classical piano lessons behind her.
Her relationship with her father is understood to be frosty at best, but she has recently spoken about a "reconciliation".
However there was no mention of Shankar in her acceptance speech at the Grammys.
Lundvall believes Jones's success is founded on lineage as much as dedication.
"There are people that are good and there are people that are very good. Then there are people who have a magic you can't even describe. Norah is one of those."- (Guardian Service)