With heavy heart-cling

By Sylvia W. Chan

EXCUSE ME FOR being gone a while, but I've been locked in the ivory tower, bound and gagged to a borrowed sense of self-importance. It's been all right – no publicists' asses to kiss, no bullshit press releases telling me some 16-year-old with fake tits and a pair of hot pants is the next Aretha, no Musiq Soulchild. What there has been, however, is music. Music to get my materialist-critique-of-third-wave-feminism-reading ass out of bed, music to stir into 3 a.m. cups of coffee, and most of all, music to breathe to, to nuzzle up and sigh with when Ass-croft is on TV telling us we're about to get blown to bits, and all the poststructuralist theory in the world won't make him shut the fuck up.

Crazy times call for gorgeous sounds, and it seems – as usual – that the music-industry buzz machine has reached out its tentacles to pluck gorgeous from the vine and come up with one Miss Norah Jones, a 22-year-old singer-songwriter from Dallas who singsplaythepiano in a bluesyjazzycountrypop kind of way. Apparently Jones is a revelation to the buzzers because, as James Sullivan over at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in his review of her show at the Fillmore last month, she "represent[s] the latest hope for lovers of the kind of music that feels like a private conversation. In February the folks at Rolling Stone gushed over Jones's "pillow-talk vocals," writing that she was "equal parts Nina Simone and Patsy Cline." Beyond that, they also think she's hot; as Don Heckman wrote in a feature for the Los Angeles Times, "With her slender figure, luminous eyes, and mane of raven hair, Jones is the sort of subject that the camera loves."

Now before all you Norah Jones fans get your panties in a bunch because you think I'm slamming her, hold up. I am not mad at Miss Jones. As it happens, I think raven-haired Miss Jones is hot too, and her album, Come Away with Me, is completely inoffensive and at times even kind of pretty. I can tell Jones means it when she sidles those gorgeous lips up to the mic and coos "The Nearness of You," that she is brimming with longing and love – and not, uh, something else – when she sings the line "I don't know why I didn't come" over and over on "Don't Know Why." I also know, however, that no 22-year-old with one album out merits comparisons to Patsy or Nina. I mean, come on, people. Show some respect.

It isn't just music writers doing the spinning. Jones's label, Blue Note, has been pushing her about as hard as such a slender young thing can get pushed, apparently (according to the Heckman piece) scrapping the first album the singer recorded with megaproducer Craig Street (Cassandra Wilson, Meshell Ndegéocello) and asking Jones to redo practically the entire thing, save for three tracks. They've also nabbed baby girl spots on The Tonight Show, The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as opening slots with John Mayer, Dave Matthews, and the Indigo Girls. And though I'm no expert, I do know it takes plenty of capital to book studio time to rerecord an entire album, and considering it took me a whole day once to nab a promo of J. Lo's new album, I'm assuming it takes way more time than that to book all that TV and stage time.

But hell, that's the music industry, and though I hate blaming "the system," that's the way it goes these days: you pick something that looks good, polish it up, and ask consumers to take a big old bite. The most heartbreaking thing in all of this, though, is that there's so much gorgeous out there that doesn't need polishing, music full of what Toni Morrison, in describing Toni Cade Bambara's work, called "heart-cling." Heart-cling is what helps you breathe when the world is whizzing too fast, the stuff that pulls you to the edge of tears, then shimmers a sob with soft, silver dust. It's something the buzzpluckers wish Norah Jones had, and something local singer-songwriter Jenna Mammina has had for years.

To be honest, I wrote this piece because of Mammina, because her latest album, Meant to Be, is one of the albums I've been breathing to more than any other, and after hearing Come Away with Me, I got this sickened feeling that Mammina had somehow been ripped off. I mean, maybe it's a fluke that so much on Jones's album is on Mammina's first release, 1999's Under the Influence – the nuzzle-up bluesyjazzycountrypop arrangements, the aching strings, the intense stillness of a naked voice, and the slow-rolled piano and guitar chords. And it could be a coincidence that a bunch of the musicians on Jones's record hail from the Bay Area (including some who've actually played with Mammina), just like it might be totally random that Jones has tunes featuring an accordion (not that popular a sound, last I checked) on her record, just like Mammina does on both her albums. And in the grand karmic scheme of things, I guess it's OK. Because Mammina owns her sound in far more complicated, vigilant ways, ways anyone who's ever heard her knows and adores. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Jones meant to rip anything off, only that somehow, some folks somewhere heard Jenna's heart-cling – the conversation she creates between song and listener that feels a whole lot like love – and figured it'd be a good idea to go out, find some gorgeous they could polish up and control, and hope like hell the buzzers would bite.

The Jenna Mammina Quartet plays Mon/3, 8 and 10 p.m., Yoshi's, 510 Embarcadero West, Jack London Square, Oakl. $15. (510) 238-9200. Mammina's CDs are available at her Web site, www.jennamammina.com.