Norah146;s ark

Meanwhile, Norah keeps clear of the Page 6 lunacy ensnaring her peers. Jones is gorgeous, but demure. While her midriff-baring pop contemporaries are busy out-tramping each other with tiny skirts and bounteous displays of cleavage, Jones dresses stylishly in a tasteful, understated way. She8217;s an anti-ho. She8217;s mysterious.

Sure, we know the oft-repeated basics: She8217;s 24, the daughter of sitar legend Ravi Shankar. She was raised in Texas by her mother, moved to NY for a summer while in college and never left. Her debut, last year8217;s Come Away With Me, is a smoky blend of jazz, pop, folk and country that sneaked into the popular consciousness and built slowly to domestic sales of more than 6 million copies and a seemingly permanent place on the Billboard charts. The record also won eight Grammys in February, including album of the year.

Yet you won8217;t see Norah Jones co-hosting the latest dreck beamed live from the MTV beach house in the Hamptons, spilling her guts in an US Weekly cover story or introducing her own line of tawdry fashion accessories. Those are things that people do when they8217;re in love with their celebrity status. Jones shuns it. 8216;8216;The record industry has gotten so into image that image becomes more important than the singer,8217;8217; she told the Los Angeles Times in a rare conversation. She much prefers to simply let her music speak for itself, so much so that she left to tour Australia shortly before the Grammys so her publicists couldn8217;t browbeat her into plugging the record.

Fortunately, Jones8217; music has a lot to say. It8217;s elegant, soulful and sultry, just the way the singer, songwriter and pianist comes across. It8217;s also the only window we have into her personality. If the songs on Come Away With Me 8212; her own and other songwriters8217; 8212; are any indication, she8217;s intelligent, a romantic, occasionally whimsical and sometimes fickle. So are a lot of people. Perhaps that8217;s the greatest gift of her self-imposed silence: It allows listeners to find themselves in her music without having to screen out half-baked social commentary or dubious fashion choices.

Jones is an entertainer, and as such, she doesn8217;t preach. She soothes. She doesn8217;t nag or scold. She uplifts. And she8217;d probably be uncomfortable at the thought, but Jones is a strong role model for young girls. Consider: She plays an instrument, writes her own songs, maintains creative control over her material having nixed a dance remix of her first single, Don8217;t Know Why and hasn8217;t made many concessions to the pop-culture meat grinder.

Instead of wearing hot pants and a studded bra in her one music video, Jones opted to wander down a beach and sit at her piano. That can8217;t be a bad thing for 13-year-old girls and boys, for that matter to see.

It8217;s not a bad thing for the record industry to see, either. The fact that Jones8217; debut built slowly into a 6-million-selling record makes a persuasive case that good music can find an audience without a multi-million dollar-publicity campaign. And she didn8217;t even have to pose topless on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Can it last? Can the unqualified success of one talented young woman endure against an industry that prizes nothing so much as a quick buck? In a sense, it doesn8217;t matter, a long as Jones stays true to herself. She8217;s already shown that her music can be popular. She has refused to compromise herself to sell a few more records. She has almost single-handedly subverted the teen-pop paradigm that had dominated music and shown there8217;s an audience for intelligent, thinking pop.

Isn8217;t that enough? LAT-WP