There are strings, brass and a high ratio of Hammond B-3 organ across much of Day Breaks, mostly as framing atmosphere: the chamber-quartet sigh behind Jones in “And Then There Was You” the barroom laughter of the horns in the New Orleans-R&B lark “Once I Had a Laugh.” Was says that when he heard “Flipside,” the first recording Jones sent him from the sessions, the B-3 glaze by guest Dr. Shorter also appears on Day Breaks’ title song, and Blade, who first played with Jones on Come Away With Me, is on all but one track, alongside either Patitucci or Chris Thomas, the bassist in Blade’s Fellowship Band. It was “the same wow” with Jones, Blade exclaims, Shorter conjuring “that pictorial thought that comes through in one note.” But the drummer grew up listening to Shorter illuminate Joni Mitchell’s late-’70s jazz-period records, before going on to record and tour with Mitchell beginning in the late 1990s. “I had never done a session with Wayne before when it wasn’t his music,” Blade points out. Shorter, on soprano sax, threads Jones’ serpentine vocal poise with decisive empathy, gently prodded by Patitucci and Blade. The opening “Burn,” one of eight new songs written or co-written by Jones, and the heated-whisper treatments of Horace Silver’s “Peace” and Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine (African Flower)” sublimely reprise that first summit meeting in D.C. Three of the 12 tracks on Day Breaks, Jones’ first studio album under her own name in four years, are that ideal realized. That’s how I envisioned Wayne and I on this record, floating over a groove in real songs.” ‘Yeah, this is what I like!’-a groove with a melody floating over the top. “I just plugged myself into Wayne’s band. “Of course, it was a lot more stretched out when Wayne and those guys did it,” she adds brightly. It’s a song that lends itself to stretching out.” “The interesting thing about the recorded version,” Jones says of “I’ve Got to See You Again,” “is that I don’t think I’ve ever performed it live that way. She credits Moran with suggesting that she collaborate with Shorter and his rhythm section at the Blue Note party. Two years later, over lunch in a café near her home in Brooklyn, Jones looks back at that night-the giant step that eventually led to her quietly triumphant new album, Day Breaks-with continuing wonder and gratitude. “I also might have said, ‘You should do more.'” It was indescribable.'” Was pauses, then laughs. Was recalls that as Jones walked off to ecstatic applause, passing him in the wings, “I went, ‘Man, I wish we’d recorded that. The result was a stunning, bonded ascension of voice and improvisation-“something I had never heard in my life,” recalls current Blue Note President Don Was, who was standing by the side of the stage. Jones, now 37, then sang another ballad from that album, Jesse Harris’ Indo-blues shuffle “I’ve Got to See You Again,” playing it for the first time with a diamond-standard jazz band: saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade-three-fourths of Shorter’s titanic working quartet-plus pianist Jason Moran, the evening’s musical director. The singer-songwriter and pianist-a Blue Note artist since the start of this century, signed by the late Bruce Lundvall when she was just 21-performed a solo version of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “The Nearness of You,” the last song on her 2002 debut, Come Away With Me: by far the label’s biggest mainstream-pop success, with more than 26 million copies sold worldwide. On May 11, 2014, Norah Jones took the stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., during “Blue Note at 75,” an all-star concert celebrating the rich history and robust health of jazz’s most iconic record company.
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