The best-selling jazz musician of the 2000s seemed to come out of nowhere. Her teachers know a thing about that.
Last Sunday at Dallas’ Balcony Club, a lifelong teacher paid quiet tribute to his most successful student.
Blue Note emptied the vaults with its 44-track anniversary reissue of the album, and brought a little share of that massive spotlight back to Jones’ hometown in the form of the release’s first bonus track: a one-off take on the standard “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most,” recorded at Booker T. while she was still a student there. Listeners get a taste of what all Jones’ teachers heard long before she was an international star: her talent and potential already obvious.
Luis Martinez, who taught at Booker T. for 32 years, is responsible for the bonus track Blue Note just released — one of many recordings he made for Jones over her three years at the school. He’ll never forget the first, though. Martinez had set up to record Jones’ at the piano without vocals because as far as he and almost everyone else knew, the sophomore was a jazz piano “major” in the school’s parlance. When she arrived, she surprised him by asking for a vocal mic as well.
“One day she said, ‘I want to start singing,’” remembers Bonk. “I said, ‘OK, sing me something.’ It sounded like a kid in choir, all in that head voice. In my head I said, ‘This kid will never be a singer.’” Bonk would play a blues or jazz lick for Jones and have her sing and play the lick back to her to develop her ear and connect her phrasing as an instrumentalist to her phrasing as a vocalist. “It makes you a much more melodic player — you can see how melodically she plays,” says Bonk. “I was always taught simplicity and space. The space is where the emotion comes from, you know.”
Jones more than held her own, according to her teachers. “She had and still has one of the finest right hands for jazz piano that we had during the many, many years that I was there,” says Bart Marantz, who was the director of jazz studies at Booker T. for 32 years. “When they listen to her play piano, they are hearing an incredible touch.”
Integral to that story is how much Texas shaped her sound and the achievements of the album — far beyond “Lonestar,” “a country song,” as Jones recalls Blue Note’s late president Bruce Lundvall describing it. “It was an extremely weird success,” Jones says. “There’s a tipping point where you kind of can’t control it anymore, and that’s the scary part — you just have to kind of hold on and wait for the ride to slow down and hope that things go well. I’m super grateful for it now.”
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