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Norah Jones
The American singer, musician and actress Norah Jones started her career in 2002, when her album "Come away with me" was released featuring a mature blend of jazz combined with many other influences like folk, soul and country music. The album was very successful and received several awards, including a Grammy award for best album of the year. After the success of her first album, it took 2 years for the next installment to see the light of day in 2004, which was called "Feels like Home”. It took another 3 years for her third album to come out in 2007 that was called "Not too late", followed by "The Fall" in 2009. Norah Jones has become an accomplished performer over the years with more than 17 million records sold in the United States alone. Worldwide she has sold approximately 37 million copies of her albums. These sales figures make her the most sold female jazz performer of her time.
Joni Mitchell
Roberta Joan Anderson, better known as Joni Mitchell, is a musician, writer and artist who originally came from Canada. She started off in the western parts of the country by performing at the smaller local clubs. During the sixties she moved to the United States, where she found her place in the lively music scene of New York City. This resulted in the release of her first record in 1968. Before Mitchell became famous for her performing abilities, she became well known for her writing skills. Eventually she ended up in the South of California, where she became a key player in the Folk rock music scene. Her album "Blue" which was released in 1971 is recognized as being the most influential album of the Folk rock scene of that period.
During the seventies Mitchell’s musical style increased in complexity, as more Jazz influences entered into the musical mix. Introducing Jazz into her distinctive sound, enabled her to play with several of the legendary performers in the Jazz scene, like Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny. During the eighties, Mitchell turned more towards pop, while the nature of her songs became more politically themed, often protesting against social or environmentally themed issues, though she never completely turned away from the emotional type of songs that started off her career at the beginning.
Her work has earned the respect of both her critics and her colleagues in music. Though not official, Joni Mitchell is often regarded as the most powerful female artist of her time. Besides music, Mitchell is a gifted painter and has created most of her album covers herself. Over the years she has shifted her focus more to her art work, as a means of protest against the music industry, but she did not leave the music scene completely and released "Shine", her first album after almost a decade in 2007.
John Martyn
Born in 1948 Iain David McGeachy was a singer, writer and guitar player from the United Kingdom. Better known as John Martyn, he released 20 records during his career that lasted four decades. He worked with all the well known musical legends, like Eric Clapton and Phil Collins. Martyn passed away in 2009, and was known as a gifted guitar player and singer, whose unique sound, which was a mixture of jazz, rock and blues, laced with folk overtones, melted the different genres into one.
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