Ravinia 2024 Issue 2

Norah Jones and her band in her July 8, 2003, Ravinia debut Chris Thile, and Questlove joined by Christian McBride. As herself, she had memorable cameos on 30 Rock and in Seth McFarlane’s raunchy comedy Ted, for which she wrote the Oscar-nomi- nated song “Everybody Needs a Best Friend.” Throughout her career, Jones has resisted being pigeonholed. Her albums are on the venerable jazz label Blue Note, but the genre-defying Jones is also a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. Visions , her first non-holiday album in four years, is a lively departure from her 2020 album Pick Me Up Off the Floor , which Glide Magazine called “brooding and melancholy” (but in a good way). “The reason I called the album Visions ,” Jones says, “is because a lot of the ideas came in the middle of the night or in that moment right before sleep.” Leastways, her voice is as dreamy as ever. It’s an album of soaring harmonies and the catchiest of hooks, produced by and featuring Gram- my-nominated multi-instrumentalist Leon Michels. Take the song “I Just Wanna Dance.” We don’t know what’s troubling the singer, but she proclaims, “I don’t want to talk about it, I just wanna dance.” Jones says she and drummer Homer Steinweiss “were just playing around with this song, and I was on Wurlitzer. The song pretty much just repeats the same thing over and over. Afterward, Leon was like, ‘We’ll change some of the lyrics around,’ and I was like ‘No, I just want to dance! That’s it!’ That’s the whole sentiment of the song. There is no verse, there is nothing else, so hopefully the groove and the vocals carry it, because that was the plan!” While Come Away With Me was recorded in its entirety three times, Visions “sprang from an improvisatory immediate space,” according to Gram- my.com . Jones shared with the website, “I didn’t really have a lot of precon- ceived ideas. We just wrote and played. I love playing music with people and collaborating and trying new things, and I feel very at ease with myself and as myself in all those situations. Which is why it works, I think. I’m not trying to be somebody else when I do this. I’m comfortable, but I love to just try new clothes on musically.” Jones has come a long way since the days when she was a freshman music major studying jazz piano at the University of Texas. New York sing- er-songwriters Richard Julian and Jesse Harris heard her sing and encouraged her to drop out of college. Armed with demos she recorded in her high school band room (you can hear them on Come Away With Me ’s expanded box set), she went to New York, waitressed, played gigs, caught the ears of a Blue Note executive, and, well, you know the rest. Two years ago marked the 20th anniversary of Come Away With Me , or as NPR’s Jazz Night in America host Nate Chinen joked, the album you’ve heard a thousand times “standing in line at Starbucks.” Jones, not one for looking back, reflected on the album in several char- acteristically charming and self-effacing interviews. The album, she told Salon, was born out of growing up listening to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis. “I used to think that Come Away With Me was such a mellow record,” she said, “but it is actually a sweet little record. Is it melancholy? Yes, but it also has so many hopeful notes to it. I don’t even know how to do that sometimes now (laughs), because I am usually drawn to the sad lyric – maybe it is my age now, maybe it is from just living life. But Come Away With Me definitely has a looking-forward, hopeful, romantic quality to it, which was age-appropriate at the time.” D onald Liebenson is a Chicago-based entertainment writer. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune , Chicago Sun-Times , Los Angeles Times , and on RogerEbert.com. The first Ravinia concert he attended without his parents was Procol Harum in 1970. RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JULY 1 – JULY 21, 2024 8 PREVIOUSSPREAD:JOELLEGRACETAYLOR THISPAGE:BOBCARL/RAVINIA