BLUE NOTE OFFERS
MORE NORAH—ON DVD

Blue Note is rush-releasing a Norah Jones DVD, Live in New Orleans, into stores this week to take advantage of her album’s eight-Grammy haul.

Blue Note Director of Marketing Zach Hochkeppel, fully recovered from the playground abuse he experienced for his name as a child, said the new DVD should be priced as low as $9.99 at retail, and the label is purposely taking a low-key approach to its release.

“We’re banking on people seeing it in stores and buying it,” he explained. “We've done very little advertising or promotion. Norah is concerned about overexposure. She doesn’t want to make it look like we’re flooding the market. This is all happening so fast for her she’s a little anxious. She wants a long-term career, and so do we.”

The hour-long, 16-track DVD, filmed last Aug. 24 at the House of Blues in New Orleans, includes five songs not on the quadruple-platinum Come Away With Me album—which promises to explode from its current OTC total of more than 3.5 million.

The concert, in Dolby digital 5.1 surround, features the unreleased, Jones-penned “What Am I to You?” and “Something Is Calling You,” written by Grammy winner Jesse Harris. There are also performances of the standard “Comes Love,” “Bessie Smith,” a song from Bob Dylan and The Band's The Basement Tapes, and the Patti Page hit “Tennessee Waltz” as an encore. Along with the live performance, the DVD features the video for the album’s title track.

The label is shipping 200k and looking for a first-week number somewhere between Paul McCartney (60k) and the Dixie Chicks (50k) and the John Mayer long-form video released a couple of weeks ago (22k).

Hochkeppel says the DVD is a “snapshot as to where she was. It captures her in the kind of intimate setting she won’t be playing in the near-future. You can see her when she was still under the radar, when she wasn’t as seasoned a performer as she will be this time around.”

Jones embarks on a summer-long tour on June 6 in Fort Meyers, Fla., with the last scheduled date Aug. 15 at Red Rocks in Colorado.