Norah Jones - Biography

Norah Jones was born in New York City on 30^th March 1979. Daughter of great musician Ravishankar and Sue. At the age of four Norah Jones and her mother relocated to the Dallas suburb of Grapevine, Texas. Since her childhood Norah shows her interest in music. At the age of 5 Norah began singing in church choirs.

At 15 Norah get explored to jazz while attending Dallas Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. During high school, Norah Jones won the Down Beat Student Music Awards for Best Jazz Vocalist and Best Original Composition in 1996, and earned a second Best Jazz Vocalist award in 1997. Norah played her first gig on her 16th birthday, an open-mic night at a local coffeehouse, where she performed a version of I'll Be Seeing You that she'd learned from Etta James treatment of this Billie Holiday favorite.

Putting her vocal talents on the back burner, Jones worked toward earning a degree in jazz piano at the University of North Texas for two years before accepting a friend's offer of a summer sublet in Greenwich Village during the summer of 1999. Jones appeared regularly with the trip-hop-electronica band Wax Poetic and assembled her own group around songwriters Jesse Harris (guitar) and Lee Alexander (bass), with Dan Rieser on drums

Jones performed quite frequently with guitarist Charlie Hunter in 2001 and appeared on Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below album in a duet with André 3000 in 2003. In early 2002, she released a debut album, Come Away With Me, mellow, acoustic pop with soul and country. It hit #1 on Billboard 200, with single "Don't Know Why" hitting #1 on Top 40 Adult Recurrents in 2003.

Norah Jones walked away from the Grammy Awards of 2003 with eight awards. By receiving Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist honors all in 2003, Jones was the first artist to sweep the "Big Four", or the four most prestigious Grammy awards, since Christopher Cross did so in the Grammy Awards of 1981. It should be noted that the Song of the Year award went to Jesse Harris for writing "Don't Know Why", but because Jones performed the song, she is associated with winning Song of the Year as well. Of the eight awards that came from "Come Away With Me" at the 2003 Grammy Awards, Jones personally received five awards with the other three awards attributed to the album itself.