NORAH NORAH NORAH

“Lines on your face”, she says, don’t bother her and I’m quite the crinkled forehead-and-chin at the moment, trying to perceive the nuances in her song...This talk right here maybe about the Jones girl with spunk and a musical genre that truly isn’t purist, and certainly spans styles, but hey, with soul (pun intended). What’s in the cache you ask, and how do I put this eloquently, I gush. The unplugged vocals and plucking of the strings, the piano, the drumming…which is it? I got to hint at the strength in what she sings (and of course, how she does sing, my god!) there’s certainly element in there…trace it out.

Her recent re-doing live of her best so far rendition (and my favorite) I’ve got to see you again, in New Orleans now streams live on You tube, quite the history, given the city being the birthplace of Jazz… And Norah in a large or small sense, representing the contemporary state and stage of the music genre…its alive and kicking, and sounding better.

“I have a real big fear of being overexposed” she said once and I truly feared that for her. Musically however, I think she has both passed the test and failed it. I still am stuck to her older album releases, and a CD burned out for me specially (by a friend) with songs that were not on her albums… some of those, singles prior to Come Away With Me. And then came along the next album, with Sunrise leading. Sunrise is pretty catchy, but it leans toward pop, and the rest of the album didn’t work too well. So the failing, but that’s with me….the world has loved all of her so far. Yet, Norah the star is not who-and-what I want to talk about. So much for my stream-of-consciousness, let’s talk current status of jazz related styles.

I want to focus on some of Norah’s work that has impacted the genre/s in particular. Let’s talk Jazz. I’m not the best to be dolling out historical perspectives, I can barely get names straight, though I can’t help but observe the influences and genre overlap right from the inception eras to the modern “decade-ears” of mine. A predominantly Black musical movement- there’s that entire social context to musical evolution that we often forget to credit. Yes, we all do know that “field hollers” (as local folk-calls while-working-in-the-fields-of-the-new-world were called during the slavery times) shaped initial offerings to Jazz amalgamations with popular white and church styles. But then, the blues got darker. Some of the lighter elements of Jazz separated out to turn palatable and palpable. Don’t know it that was a good thing, but blues turned around and walked out alone. Agree or not, music did lend to a cultural understanding of continents…African music in the American context could not help but handle the urban context, and churned the blues. Conditions of life, condition of your personal rhythm, and conditions of collective music…we have something to say, our souls are in pain. So I contest the birthplace of Jazz with my posting of the new candidate- the black soul, and that was in a lighter vein.

My point is how much of any music today rises out of a true life condition? Most genres were creators being true to the tonality of their rhythmic utterance, “Jazz” being a great example. In Norah’s context however the element of jazz (element, as I should call it, reasons being the term overlap) seems to preserve its nature, urbane and slick with ‘proud-modesty’ and honest sound. Pain is the debatable factor, yet, probably Norah’s attempts to write her own lyrics will convince me. And she’s done that in her latest release, Not Too Late but I’m yet to tune in. As for keeping social context alive in our music, a whole generation needs to do some soul searching and look up jazz for inspiration. So much for talk, where’s the music toggle?

Deepak Srinivasan