Norah Jones to seduce Taipei with jazz

Norah Jones plays Sinchuang Stadium on Monday night. PHOTO COURTESY OF BLUE NOTE

Monday night is an odd time to try to pack a stadium for a concert, but if you're Norah Jones it's a simple matter. Though just 26 years old, the singer-songwriter has already enjoyed storybook success in her career. With Taiwan the biggest outlet for her music in Asia -- she's sold more than 200,000 CDs here -- tickets for her Monday night show at Sinchuang Stadium are going fast.

Jones' music is a blend of pop, blues, country and contemporary folk that's ground to a pulp and steeped in steamy jazz. Her sultry vocal styling is the result of years spent picking through the extensive record collection of her mother, New York concert producer Sue Jones. Nina Simone and Billie Holiday were her childhood influences, among others.

She was born in Brooklyn in 1979 but her mother soon moved her to Grapevine, Texas. She sang in the church choir starting at age 5, began studying the piano two years later and played the alto saxophone for a short time during junior high.

But her formative years came during high school. She enrolled in Dallas' Booker T. Washington School for the Performing Arts. While still in high school, she won Down Beat Student Music Awards for best jazz vocalist and best original composition, picked up another for best vocalist the next year, then picked up and moved to Greenwich Village the summer before her senior year.

She was supposed to stay only for the summer, but the music kept her there. "The music scene is so huge," she later told the Associated Press. "I found it very exciting. I especially enjoyed hearing amazing songwriters at little places like The Living Room. Everything opened up for me."

In New York, she began playing with trip-hop, funk-fusion outfit Wax Poetic, assembled her own group with Jesse Harris on guitar, Lee Alexander on Bass and, in 2000, put together a demo for Blue Note Records. She spent the next year performing with Charlie Hunter and working on material for her Blue Note debut, Come Away With Me, with which she had the help of Aretha Franklin's producer, Arif Mardin.

Her debut was released in 2002, featuring jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade and immediately garnered considerable attention in music circles, sold over 6 million copies around the world and earned her a total of eight Grammy Awards.

But of all the famous influences listed in Jones' official biography, her father, world-renowned sitar player Ravi Shankar, doesn't get a mention. The two were estranged for 10 years but reconnected slightly before Jones's windfall of success.

"Truth be told, I wouldn't have wanted him to come see me in a little bar where everyone was talking. I'm over everything, I don't resent him. I just don't want him to be the focus of all my press," she said after her sweep of the 2003 Grammy Awards, in which her half sister, Anoushka Shankar, was also nominated for Best World Music Album.

Jones's latest release, Feels Like Home came out on Blue note Records last year.