The Fall [Blue Note]



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Heartbreak is good for artists. It just plain is. Songwriters benefit from inner toil and character-building suffering. It helps them get to the ugly underneath, where all the best songs wait to be discovered. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but let’s face it — most artists who don’t suffer write really vapid, forgettable songs.



Heartbreak seems to have come in the nick of time for Norah Jones, the talented pianist and songwriter who was so laid back as to be nearly horizontal up until the release last week of “The Fall.” The ennui her pretty, gauzy, half-asleep pop-jazz summoned in the listener was threatening to envelop its creator as well, to the point where even Jones was starting to



Norah Jones



sound bored with her music.



No longer. The breakup of her long relationship with bassist Lee Alexander last year also meant that Jones lost her band. That’s an awful lot of change to swallow in one sitting. “The Fall” examines the hypnagogic atmosphere of damaged love, but so happily, Jones sounds liberated, not bereft.



Musically, Jones has abandoned the barely buzzing lite-jazz-pop-C&Wmelange she previously favored, hooked up with Tom Waits’ colleague Jacquire King as producer, unleashed electronic keyboards and electric guitars where once reigned upright bass and acoustic piano, and given us a reason to care. She still sounds like herself, but the arrangements surrounding her singing now breathe and move freely about the sonic spectrum. This is easily Jones’ finest hour on record.



—J. M.