Peter Malick Group Featuring Norah Jones: New York City

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * *)

And more with the Jones connection. Malick is a New York singer/guitarist who, a couple of years before most, heard Jones sing in a small cafe and was knocked out by her. In the liner notes to this album - doubtless unsanctioned by Jones' people and released to their irritation - he tells how he met her, suggested they work on some blues-tinged material, toured a little to sometimes indifferent audiences and over a few weeks recorded the material on this half-hour-long album.

Malick has previously made harder-edged blues than this but clearly Jones' style slowed him down because here the material mostly favours Jones in blues ballad mode on a series of Malick originals (except for their cover of Dylan's Heart of Mine).

The band is sound if unexceptional - Hammond player Danny McGough adds most of the colour - and the tempo kicks up on Things You Don't Have To Do, a duet with the syllable-dragging Malick where Jones proves she can cut it, in the manner of Bonnie Raitt, on this kind of material also.

The title track, here in two edits to pad out the short running time, would fit on Come Away With Me.

But this is a minor addition to our knowledge of Jones, and while those who have worn out her album will find much to enjoy here, you can't help thinking that if she'd stayed with Malick we might never have heard of her.

Label: Shock