For someone who is the daughter of the great Ravi Shankar, Norah Jones sure gets picked on a lot.
Since arriving on the scene with her Grammy Award winning, multi-platinum selling debut album Come Away with Me in 2002, she has been pigeonholed as the champ (or is that chump?) of “dinner jazz” – the kind of music Cherie Blair turns to when entertaining guests at Number 10 to drown out the fake laughter and degrading comments about dear Tony’s all round inadequacy.
Not Too Late is Norah’s third album and is being billed as her “most personal statement to date”. Co produced by Lee Alexander, her long time songwriting partner and bassist, it was recorded in the couple’s new home studio in Manhattan with a whole host of musician friends including jazz organist Larry Goldings, Kronos Quartet cellist Jeff Ziegler and singer Daru Oda stopping by and contributing.
They say:
Uncut: “Subtle, political, surprisingly radical.”
Q: “Lovingly crafted and sweetly sung.”
Mojo: “The bar has been raised… Jones has reclaimed her music on her terms.”
We say:
Not Too Late sounds exactly like would expect, Norah’s smoky voice drifting over serene chords originating from her love for Bill Evans, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and with invigorating splashes of country lap steel guitar and electric piano. Ridicule be damned, the singer songwriter knows her target audience.
The real surprise here is the political nature of much of the material. ‘Sinkin Soon’, which sounds like a castrated Tom Waits chewing the fat with Kurt Weill in Texas, is a smart dig at the current situation in Iraq.
Opener ‘Wish I Could’, gently coerced by acoustic guitar and gorgeous cellos, speaks of a love triangle set against the backdrop of a war (“Love in the time of war is not fair/He was my man but they didn’t care/Sent him far away from here/No goodbye/… I don’t tell her that I once loved you too/Or about all the things we used to do”).
‘My Dear Country’, meanwhile, is the closest she’s ever come to penning an outright protest song, revelling in her country’s freedom of speech ethos much to the surprise of Cherie and her suit ‘n’ tie guests.
“But fear’s the only thing I saw/And three days later ‘twas clear to all/That nothing is as scary as election day,” she sings alongside waltzing Matilda piano, adding later: “‘Cause we believed in our candidate/But even more it’s the one we hate/I needed someone I could shake/On election day.”
Melodic, socially conscious and at times darkly comic, Not Too Late will at the very least provoke meaningful conservation at the dinner table.
Like this? Try these:
Bill Evans – New Jazz Conceptions
Nina Simone – The Very Best of Nina Simone
The Little Willies – The Little Willies
RELEASED
29th Jan ‘06
LABEL
Parlophone
POSTED...
Sun 28 Jan 2007 at 10:36am
