Jesse Harris And The Ferdinandos: The Secret Sun

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Like the poor, Norah Jones seems to have been with us always. Her debut album Come Away With Me has been on the charts here 69 weeks - mostly in the top 10 and a swag of that time at No 1. It has sold more than 135,000 copies, which means about one in six homes has a copy. And every hair salon and cafe.

Her airy album, with its tasteful blend of jazz-lite and country inflections, has drawn into record shops people who haven't been there for years. She's the Dire Straits of her generation.

It's a fair guess that those who have been playing her album at home the past year might now want something new from the lady. That won't be forthcoming for a while, but something Jones-connected and interesting has turned up.

Harris is the New York singer/songwriter who played guitar and wrote five songs on Jones' album, the Grammy-grabbing hit Don't Know Why among them.

Harris has recorded four albums with the Ferdinandos and wisely went back to that creditable group (members have played with Tom Waits, Lounge Lizards and Bill Frisell) rather than hitch his wagon to the Jones gravy train.

He's a songwriter who takes away rather than adds - as his work with Jones illustrated - and his band is much the same. So here are mostly spare and melodically understated songs (which should appeal to Jones fans) with country and light blues inflections, and some classic folk-pop balladry.

With only a couple of country-rocking exceptions, it's all delivered in his slightly lazy and intimate, if sometimes undistinguished, way.

Imagine a young, less cynical and more romantic Loudon Wainwright. Or a Paul Simon who grew up in the Midwest listening to Jackson Browne instead of Bob Dylan in slightly boho coffee shops. Or a David Gray gone alt-country.

At times there's a quivering Gray-like fragility to Harris' singing, which is endearing and engaging, and he effortlessly writes material such as Long Way From Home, where he borrows a page from the Great American Songbook. You can imagine a dozen singers from kd laing to Nick Lowe covering it.

Elsewhere he gets the backbeat kicking (You Were On My Mind), explores a low Band-like blues feeling (The Other Road, the traditional Roberta) or lets go with those slippery jazzy stylings which were a hallmark of the Jones album (the gorgeous and leisurely You, the Queen).

Miss Jones appears as his ersatz Emmylou on What Makes You - but even if Harris hadn't come to greater attention courtesy of Jones, the undemanding evidence here is that some day we'd have heard of him anyway.

Label: Blue Thumb