Old Pecan Street Festival and Norah Jones
Tattoo In Blue Jeans
Sorry to disappoint, there’s no pictures of Norah Jones here but we did see her at Stubbs’ last night and a great show it was too. The photograph, taken this afternoon, is from this weekend’s Old Pecan Street Festival. Austinites have invented many justifications for a party and this twice a year, spring and fall, street art market is one of them.
I had only acquired Norah Jones latest album, “The Fall”, a few weeks ago in order to be up to date with her latest material before the gig on Saturday. From the album I knew that this was not to be the butter melting voice and lounge jazz pianist Norah Jones of “Come Away With Me” and “Feels Like Home”; sure the voice is still velvet smoke and the piano is still a major component but the new recordings are as much about guitar as piano and the keyboards are as likely to be electric as acoustic. Even with this preparation the live act was still a surprise; I did not expect a Norah Jones band to rattle my lungs against my ribs with drums and bass. And Ms Jones did not touch a key, ivory or plastic, until the fourth or fifth number. For those first tracks, four of the six piece band, including Jones, were on electric guitars (no bass) laid over drums and a Hammond style organ tone reminiscent of 70’s rock. On a couple of numbers, Sasha Dobson, whose vocals are too rich to be called “backup”, swapped her guitar for drum sticks to double up the percussion.
It was all still unmistakably Norah Jones, even when the band enthusiastically covered a Neil Young song, but she certainly doesn’t fit in the jazz lounge pigeon hole that some wanted to consign her to anymore. It’s hard to say what her sound is, but that is fitting for someone whose father sat cross legged on stage and introduced America to the sitar at the ’67 Monterey Pop Festival. Why would anyone expect Norah Jones to fit in a pigeon sized box.
A handful left during the announced final song to avoid the crush at the gates, a larger number left when the encore did not instantly materialize after a few seconds of clapping and yelling; and they all lost out big time. Taking advantage of the outdoor setting behind the southern two story porch restaurant building, the two final numbers were delivered as an unplugged quartet gathered around a single microphone on the cast iron staircase landing; forty feet deeper into and six feet above the heads of the audience. Now thats a memorable way to end a memorable evening.
