Norah Jones & Rufus Wainwright

TWO OF A KIND: Norah Jones and Rufus Wainwright mine the past for new treasures

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: May 2, 2012  http://www2.the-burg.com 

Rufus Wainwright, Out of the Game (Decca)

Norah Jones, Little Broken Hearts (Blue Note)

Along with ubiquitous internet commerce, coast-to-coast cell service, and the Y2K bug that never was, the 21st century was supposed to usher in a brave new era for music, one in which the cut-and-paste art of sampling and the seemingly endless possibilities of digital recording would forever transform our very notion of songwriting. So it's at least a little amusing, if not telling, that two of the more enduring artists who emerged around the turn of this century — singer/songwriter/pianists Norah Jones and Rufus Wainwright — were both the products of strikingly traditional musical upbringings, each grounded in a certain nostalgia for not just sounds from the past, but a rigorous and very non-digital aesthetic.

COMFORTABLY SUNG: Waiinwright chills to some ’70s-styled pop

       Wainwright, whose seventh album, Out of the Game, arrives this week along with Jones' new Little Broken Hearts, is famously the progeny of the acerbic folk luminary Loudon Wainwright III and the late singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle of McGarrigle Sisters fame. A piano prodigy, Wainwright began performing with his mom's folk group as a young teenager, studied opera, and immersed himself in the highly stylized recordings of the iconic French chanteuse Edith Piaf and her American counterpart Judy Garland. By the time of the release of his 1998 self-titled solo debut, an ambitious amalgam of piano-based cabaret pop, vaguely operatic vocals, and lush orchestrations courtesy of the legendary Van Dyke Parks, Wainwright had already won the equivalent of a Canadian Oscar for best original song and the 1990 Juno for most promising male vocalist of the year.

       A fellow piano prodigy, who garnered three DownBeat awards — two for best jazz vocalist and another for best original composition — in high school, Jones is the daughter of the internationally revered sitar virtuoso and one-time Beatles collaborator Ravi Shankar. After getting her start in New York City as something of a lounge act, and testing the trip-hop waters with the band Wax Poetic, she was signed to the jazz label Blue Note, who paired her with heavyweight producer Arif Martin for her first solo album, the international blockbuster and eight-time Grammy-winner Come Away With Me. That disc introduced Jones as a sultry, jazz-inflected singer/songwriter with sophisticated sensibilities, a quiet force of natural beauty whose healthy regard for the greats (Billie Holliday, Hoagy Carmichael, Hank Williams) is matched by her own well-tuned ear for subtle shifts of mood and artfully affecting melodies.

       A more idiosyncratic talent than Jones, Wainwright didn't come by commercial success so quickly. But, as a perennial critics' darling with a loyal and large cult audience, he's been free to follow his wry muse far and wide, from gaudy pop confessionals to the stripped-down adaptations of several Shakespearean sonnets that adorned 2010's deeply personal All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu; from the straight up Garland tribute of 2007's Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, to a full-on opera production, Prima Donna, that premiered in 2009. So it’s almost a little shocking to find Wainwright settling comfortably into a fairly familiar role on Out of the Game, a pleasantly accessible, soft-focus foray into the realm of mellowed-out mid-‘70s pop.

       “I’m looking for something that can’t be found on the main drag,” he artlessly croons on the disc’s easy grooving title track, a vintage sounding tune with a sharp guitar hook and the kind of warm analog production that really is getting harder and harder to find on “the main drag.” Produced by Mark Ronson, the mastermind behind Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black and Adele’s 19, Out of the Game pairs Wainwright with his pal Sean Lennon, the NYC retro r&b band the Dap-Kings, and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, players who all seem quite comfortable revisiting the days when artists like Elton John were blending jazz, country, rock, and even a bit of blues into something seamless that worked as “mainstream pop,” when artists routinely piled on the strings, keyboards, and choruses of background vocalists without sacrificing a certain intimacy or the nearly tangible organic chemistry of “rock band.”

       The over-achieving Wainwright has never seemed quite this laid back, as he incorporates some gospel in the yearning “Jericho,” toys with flittering synths in the melancholy “Barbara,” and takes excursions into country (“Respectable Dive”), a kind of understated funk (“Perfect Man”), and fingerpicked acoustic folk (“Sometimes You Need”). And yet, there’s an undeniable intensity underlying even the most peaceful moments on Out of the Game, a confessional quality that’s most moving when he imagines the child he recently had with Leonard Cohen’s daughter Lorca coming to visit him and his partner in “Montauk,” and when he delivers “Candles,” a Celtic-themed elegy which would seem to be inspired by the passing of his mother.

A TOUCH OF EVIL: Norah Jones finds discovers torch-siinging dark side

On Little Broken Hearts, Norah Jones goes off on a retro excursion of her own, this time with a little help from her friend Brian Burton, the producer who goes by Danger Mouse and who co-wrote the album and adds much of the instrumentation to the tunes. Recasting herself as an alluring torch-singer, wounded in romance and smoldering with a touch of evil, Jones steps out from behind her piano and wrestles vulnerably with her mixed emotions. “Well it ain’t easy to stay in love if you can’t tell lies,” she sings coyly against a high strung bass line, thumping drums, and various vintage keyboards, before concluding, “It ain’t easy to stay in love when you’re telling lies/So I’ll just have to take a bow and say goodbye.”

       Much like Rome, the Danger Mouse-produced spaghetti-western homage Jones guested on last year, Little Broken Hearts plays like a faux film score, the soundtrack to a noir-ish decent into the dark side of love. The broken hearts in the disc’s eerily incandescent title track have come to life as knife-bearing visages intent on hunting down their exes. And in the whispery “Miriam,” Jones’ sweetly sung vocals reveal a sinister plot: “Now I’m not the jealous type, never been the killing kind/But you know I know what you did, so don’t put up a fight. . . You know you done me wrong/I’m gonna take your life.”

       Jones is great in character. She leaves you wanting to see what she might be able to do with this particular alter-ego on screen. But she and Burton have hemmed themselves into an approach that’s so stylized that it sometimes sacrifices substance. Jones has cool detachment down cold. But it’s a relief when she breaks character for a little guitar-driven road-trip romp (“Out on the Road”). And, after a while, you just kinda wanna hear her cut loose on piano, and bring a little Wainwright warmth to the party. In fact, she might want to think about teaming up with Mark Ronson for her next album.