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Norah's musical 'yatra'
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Norah Jones has made a mark thanks to her impressive vocal range in her Grammy winning album, `Come Away with Me.'
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SHE SWEPT the Grammy awards this year -- Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year, Record Of The Year, Best New Artist, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Female Vocal Performance, Producer Of The Year and Best Engineered Album, eight awards in all, it is undoubtedly an impressive feat in modern day pop music.
Add to this a desi connection of being the sitar maestro, Pandit Ravi Shankar's daughter, the Indian listeners have more to cheer. International listeners do not generally know Norah's Indian connection as she was born in New York on March 30, 1979, and hardly four years later, her family shifted to Texas, where Norah's musical influences began with her Mother's collection of "retro" LPs.
A year later, Norah joined the church choir and after a few months, she started playing the piano and tried her hand at the saxophone as well. In fact, her Grammy-winning album, Come Away With Me (Virgin Records; Rs. 135) has Norah playing the piano along with the vocals.
A while later, when Norah was around 15 years of age, she shifted her base to Dallas city and joined the Booker T. Washington school for performing and visual arts and finally on her 16th birthday, her rendering of the classic, I'll Be Seeing You bagged her the Down Beat Student Music Awards for Best Jazz Vocalist and later the Best Original Composition.
By the time she graduated, Norah had mastered the jazz piano and enhanced her vocal range. Once she moved to Manhattan in 1999, there was no turning back for Norah she was a regular face with a funk-fusion band called Wax poetic and later, with a couple of friends, formed her own band.
Norah began recording the tracks for Come Away With Me in May 2001, "I was nervous at first. I didn't want some amazing producer who'd done all these famous records to come in and have me be scared to tell him what I thought," was her initial reaction when she had Craig Street to help her with her music.
Little did she know that her endeavour would go down in history as one of the very few albums in many years to win as many as eight major Grammy titles, and give her an overnight fame with her very first studio album.
The 14-track album includes her hit single, Come Away With Me and many impressive tracks like Don't Know Why and Painter Song. The album is a refreshing change from the "bubblegum pop" and "boy band music" of the times. It is not very often that a single artiste sweeps the entire cream of Grammy titles with the very first album. A copy of Come Away With Me deserves a place on your tape deck - after all, Norah didi has made us Indians proud, hasn't she?
A. VISHNU
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