Edition №8
You can own this record and still be missing the thing Blue Note paid for twice.
Norah Jones had finished her first album when her manager called to say the label had refused it. “I had a pit in my stomach and my manager at the time, Shell, called me and said that they rejected the record.” She had one deal and she assumed it was gone. “I was also just scared that I was going to lose the deal and it was over.”
The deal was unusual to begin with. Bruce Lundvall heard her demos and offered to sign her to Manhattan Records, the more pop-facing label down the hall. She turned it down and asked for the jazz one. Michael Cuscuna, who had run Blue Note’s reissue campaigns since 1984 and consulted on its signings, put her case plainly: “She was a jazz artist, playing piano and singing standards with an acoustic bass and a jazz drummer.”
She asked for Craig Street to produce, after hearing New Moon Daughter. Street took her to Allaire Studios in the Catskills with Bill Frisell, Brian Blade, Kenny Wollesen and Kevin Breit. They cut most of the songs you know, and they finished the record.
Lundvall’s objection was that it “had strayed too far from what was so special about the demos.”
Jones assumed at first that the problem was her singing. “I didn’t really understand what it was about it, but I thought maybe I didn’t sing very great.” Listening again, she put it somewhere else. “I didn’t love the way I sounded on them, and there was a ton of guitar.” And: “With two guitar players, at times it was just not balanced for what I wanted.”
So Blue Note paid for the album sessions a second time, and what the second payment bought was less. Arif Mardin took the chair, in his 70s, with Aretha and the Bee Gees behind him. He let Jones bring back the band from her own demos and kept the songs near to how she had first played them. Three of the Street recordings stayed. Everything else came down and went back up with “air” around it.
The album that has sold 27 million copies still has the shelved one inside it, on three tracks. Bill Frisell had played on a whole album with her. He is credited on one song of the album you likely own.
It entered the chart at 139. Eleven months later it was the number one album in America, and it stayed on that chart for 165 weeks. Cuscuna, from inside the label: “It ended up selling 10 million copies on its own steam. It was very bizarre.”
The character of this record is the space around a quiet voice, and Blue Note paid a second album budget to get it. That space is the thing I listen for when I put two pressings side by side, and in my experience it is the first thing a transfer gives up. You rarely catch it going. You just end up with a copy that sounds smaller, and you cannot say why.
Then came the 2022 anniversary, and a great many new objects. Almost none of them will tell you where they came from.
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