HOLLYWOOD (Jazz Notes) - Don't expect to find the hottest new talent in jazz singing her heart out two shows nightly, one week per city in local bebop clubs.
Norah Jones, the 22-year-old vocal phenomenon, is going the route of Mathew Shipp, Cassandra Wilson, Olu Dara, Charlie Hunter and Medeski, Martin and Wood: Blossom in the jazz camp and build with an audience that's more fond of Coldplay than Coltrane.
"Jazz, as a word, frightens people," notes restaurateur Danny Meyer, who brings 17 years of Manhattan eatery success to the March 19 reopening of Gotham's Jazz Standard with original owner James Polsky and a new upstairs barbecue joint called Blue Smoke.
That fear -- and maybe it's just common sense -- seems to be driving shakeups in the jazz business, which had a dreadful 2001. Meyer is among a handful of outsiders sensing an opportunity here, along with new label founders such as Kansas City-based singer and bandleader David Basse and Royal Crown Revue drummer Daniel Glass.
David Millman, Glass' partner in the as-yet-unnamed venture, sums up the problem jazz can't seem to shake: "In the pop world, you don't face such direct competition from catalog. But with jazz, and its monumental history, you have to give fans a compelling reason to try something new rather than fill holes in their Miles and Coltrane collections."
The old guard, which might be leaning too heavily on that catalog, has been shaky, perhaps the victim of the double-edged sword known as Ken Burns' "Jazz," the PBS documentary series of early 2001 that revived talk about the genre but had a sales revival limited to albums by dead musicians.
The impact starts at the top. Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter who was an integral part of the series, has left his label of 18 years, Columbia, and is finding no takers for what sources say is the asking price of $1 million for his talents. His brother Branford, the saxophonist who led Jay Leno's first "Tonight Show" band, also has severed ties with Columbia and is eyeing his own label, which Rounder will distribute.
Atlantic Records' jazz department has shuttered, and most of the acts moved to Warner Bros. Universal's Verve, now under the guidance of former Private Music honcho Ron Goldstein, is cutting staff and roster, instead signing familiar names from the past: pop singer Natalie Cole and saxophonist David Sanborn. Concord, which has built an impressive roster of singers that includes Karrin Alyson, Michael Feinstein and Regina Belle, also has taken the pop path, signing Barry Manilow to a long-term deal.
Crossover is becoming increasingly important to jazz labels. While the straight-ahead acts form the backbone of jazz imprints - meaning they make albums that usually cost less than $15,000 to record, and they sell fewer than 15,000 copies -- it's the acts that can appeal to fan bases from rock and pop. Jones' "Come Away With Me" sold nearly 10,000 units during the first week of March after a cavalcade of press preceded her arrival.
Blue Note, perhaps the single most identifiable brand in jazz, is going against its bebop grain as EMI's fiscal year closes out March 31, releasing three heavily promoted, crossover-oriented discs: Jones plus new recordings from Medeski, Martin & Wood, an organ-based funk act that has won over the jam band crowd, and Cassandra Wilson, whose interpretation of blues, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have elevated her to a singular seat in the jazz singing hierarchy and has her pitched at an Adult Album Alternative radio listeners.
Her lowest-selling disc since joining Blue Note, for example, was the jazziest of her albums, the Miles Davis tribute disc "Traveling Miles."
"It started with Charlie Hunter," Lundvall says of the guitarist whose recordings have ranged from solo to rap to funk to reggae. "I saw him at the Up N Down club in San Francisco, and all these kids were standing up like at a rock show. From there we went after Medeski, Martin & Wood, who were recording for Gramavision, and they loved the idea of Blue Note. The rules were then broken."
Jones' first Blue Note jazz journey is definitely the road less traveled. She opened shows for Willie Nelson in Gotham last month and had her release party at Joe's Pub. This past week she did showcases at the rock-centric South X Southwest fest in Austin; she'll be the support act for Columbia singer-songwriter John Mayer on 10 of his dates in the West; and has headlining gigs in Tennessee, where listeners might well wonder why a country-leaning singer such as Jones is on a jazz label.
