If At First You Don't Succeed....

Norah Jones and the Come Away With Me demos

Every record chronicles some sort of journey. An artist might start with a clear sense of the path ahead, but changes happen in the course of capturing “the vision.” Detours are taken. Ideas once held as sacred are later abandoned. The process of gut-check and recalibration can be painful, and also eye-opening. From it, a record is born.

Music obsessives don’t always get to witness this process, even when we plunk down big money for a super-deluxe milestone anniversary edition of a classic record. The promise of these sets is a glimpse behind the curtain. The reality can be something else – an attic tour of faintly different rehearsal takes and alternate mixes, the dim ephemera rather than the hit-making key tweak.

Here’s an exception: The 20th anniversary edition of Norah Jones’ debut for Blue Note Records, Come Away with Me. You might remember it as the record that was playing in every retail environment the early ‘2000s.  Or as the record that swept the 2003 Grammy awards, earning 8 trophies  including for Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Best New Artist. Since then, it’s sold nearly 30 million copies worldwide; it is studied in music business programs as the rare example of a jazz-adjacent work finding a mainstream audience.

At the time of release, Jones’ story had some intrigue to it. As she acknowledges in the terrific liner notes, she was uncomfortable sharing details of her personal life – that she was the daughter of the legendary sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. There was an open secret about the record itself: It was Jones’ second attempt, after sessions with the producer Craig Street were rejected by the label. Some of the versions done by Jones and Street did see daylight, but most of the early efforts remained mysterious.

This set, which features a remastered version of Come Away With Me, documents the steps Jones took to arrive at the familiar album – from the initial demo that got Blue Note interested to the original song demos that Jones and Street used as guides to material from the sessions at Street’s upstate New York studio. Looking back with a clear eye, Jones recalls the moment she began to have doubts about the project. “When the 5 days of recording were done, I stayed upstate with Husky [Husky Höskulds, the engineer] and Craig while they put together mixes of the songs in the big church-like room we had recorded in for another week. During the mixing sessions I had a lot of time to do nothing but wait and try to listen to the speakers which blurred the music straight up to the rafters and I started to question, to myself, if we’d gone too far in another direction with some of the songs.”

Jones was 21 at the time. After the label rejected the work, she took a minute to process. Looking back, she realizes now that “The musicians all played beautifully and with their whole hearts. But something about my voice just didn’t carry the songs home the way I knew it should.”

That’s when Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall – who crusaded for Jones with a true-believer fervor rarely displayed by record executives – suggested that she meet with legendary producer Arif Mardin, known for creating magic with Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Hall & Oates, among many others. The two again used the songwriting demos as a template – the familiar hit versions of “Don’t Know Why” and “Turn Me On” from Come Away with Me were built around the basic demo tracks – and incorporated performances from the Street sessions as well.

The Mardin version nudged Jones’ voice to the center of the mix while retaining the spacious, almost haunting openness that defined the earlier performances of the tunes. Mardin caught, and gently magnified, the key aspects of Jones’ art – her understatement, the casual brilliance of her phrasing, her precise piano chording, her instinctual sense of proportion and scale, density and shading. Hearing the early versions, it’s clear that Street captured those things also – but there’s something drifty, and almost too ethereal, about those productions.

Some singers burst in and demand all the attention in the room. Jones slips in through a side door and, with no fanfare, gently and devastatingly shares what’s on her mind. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Hank Williams song or a nearly worn-out jazz standard – within a verse or two she’s erased the genre classification. She owns the terrain. I was lucky to experience this several times while her debut was under construction, at a recurring gig at a place near Lincoln Center called Makor. I remember being flattened right away by her calm demeanor, and by the way she transformed over-sung standards into riveting little dramas.

After Come Away with Me hit big, the backlash came in many flavors. The one that still puzzles me is the way jazz people dismissed Jones as somehow not jazz enough. I’ve been involved in many (many!) arguments about perceived “qualifications” for jazz musicians, most of them with people who maintain narrow, doctrinaire and rigid boundaries around the definition of jazz.

These quickly fall apart with a name drop or two: Ray Charles! Snap! Or a needle drop on Norah Jones’ treatment of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” that’s included here. It’s a straightforward take, piano and voice, that’s lit up by tiny inflections and vibratoless sustained notes, captivatingly held. The phrases have a lived-in contour to them – Jones sounds like she’s been taking apart the lyric for decades, stretching the lines away from the canonical jazz-vocal readings, personalizing them with tiny little gestures and sighs. It’s all she needs.

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