Nora Jones: Before she was famous

She swept the board at the Grammys, but Norah Jones's next release was recorded while she was still a struggling singer in downtown New York, writes Phil Johnson

An avant-garde jazz album on a small German label by a guitarist from Washington, DC, and a bunch of left-field, downtown New York musicians would not, in the normal course of events, attract much attention. Even the presence of relatively well-known guests, such as the pianist Uri Caine and saxophonist David Binney, is still fairly standard fare. Add a repertoire that reworks country and folk tunes by Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Woodie Guthrie and the Carter Family, plus five traditional ballads, and the project does begin to sound more interesting, but nothing to get excited about. Enter Norah Jones.

Incredible as it may seem after her octuple Grammy whammy last month, when the 23-year-old's debut album, Come Away with Me, all but swept the board at the music-industry awards ceremony in New York, the next release by Jones – currently the world's most popular female singer – turns out to be two tracks as a guest vocalist on Free Country by Joel Harrison, on Germany's ACT label. In sessions recorded early last year, when she was still a scuffling singer-songwriter on the downtown New York scene, Jones sings Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line" and the King/Stewart standard "Tennessee Waltz", in the laid-back, jazz-meets-country style familiar from her multi-platinum-selling album.

"I Walk the Line", which opens the album, is great, too, with Jones's languid delivery recalling the Patsy Cline of "Crazy"; or, rather, it may recall Cline initially, before Joel Harrison's radical rearrangement of the tune starts to get seriously weird. "Tennessee Waltz" (whose corny melody the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins used to make a feature of) is more straightforward, and probably even better. Taken dead slow, with the accordion of Tony Cedras providing a melancholic air to proceedings, accentuated by the weeping, pedal-steel effects of Harrison's guitar-playing, the song's café orchestra-style arrangement, and Norah Jones's vocal treatment, together create a lovely, lazy, dream-like spell.

Free Country mostly turns out to deserve the reflected glory it is bound to receive. It also gets a little squeaky at times, in the approved Lower East Side avant-garde manner, so hardcore Jones fans may have to suffer, at least until they learn to program their CD-player to excise the offending numbers. Expect, therefore, to pick up a second-hand copy fairly easily in the near future.

According to Oliver Weindling, of the British independent jazz label Babel Records, which distributes ACT in Britain, Free Country has taken such a long time to come out because of problems raised by Blue Note Records, the EMI subsidiary to which Jones is signed. The special permission of Bruce Lundvall, the head of Blue Note, was required before the two songs – which Jones includes in her live shows – could be included on the album, and a number of conditions had to be met before Lundvall was satisfied.

Luckily for us, and for Joel Harrison, the problems have been resolved and the album is now scheduled for release. It's also lucky for Norah Jones, as the work is good and will help to restore some of the lost credibility that such a big popular success always entails.

'Free Country' is out on 14 April on ACT