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.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BLUE NOTE
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.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Mongolian influencer Anudari Daarya looks effortlessly glamorous and carefree in her social media posts — but the classically trained pianist’s road to acceptance as a transgender artist has been anything but easy. She is one of a growing number of Mongolian LGBTQ youth challenging stereotypes and fighting for acceptance through media representation in the socially conservative country. LGBTQ Mongolians often hide their identities from their employers and colleagues for fear of discrimination, with a survey by the non-profit LGBT Centre Mongolia showing that only 20 percent of people felt comfortable coming out at work. Daarya, 25, said she has faced discrimination since she