Two Rising Stars, Two Paths to Fulfill Potential

There’s an old saying in boxing that a good big man can always beat a good little man, and the parallel in pop music is that a good singer-songwriter can connect more consistently than simply a good singer.

In contrast to the pre-rock era, when singers just sang and writers just wrote, the tendency of today’s most gifted songwriters is to follow the path of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and record their own material. That makes it difficult for nonwriting singers to come up with enough memorable new songs to keep listeners enthralled.

So John Mayer went into Wednesday’s “rising star” pairing at the House of Blues in West Hollywood with a decided edge over Norah Jones.

By the end of the evening, however, Jones’ captivating vocals inspired a new pop truism: A potentially great singer can touch us more consistently than simply a good singer-songwriter.

Both young artists are highly touted. Their debut recordings are in the national Top 100 sales chart. Rolling Stone magazine lists them among the 10 pop acts most worth watching in 2002.

Mayer, the evening’s headliner, is a 24-year-old singer-songwriter from Atlanta whose songs are mostly framed with the intricate, sometimes sophisticated musical design that is in pop favor these days. Think Dave Matthews and David Gray.

Dallas-based Jones, 22, writes an occasional song but relies mainly on others for material. Though critics have cited everyone from Billie Holiday to Nina Simone to Patsy Cline in describing her whispery, restrained style, Jones brings a strong personal stamp to her vocals that works against such easy categorization.

While schooled in jazz, Jones employs the instincts of a soulful pop singer, with a strain of country running through her music and phrasing.

Backed tastefully by Lee Alexander on bass and Adam Levy on guitar, Jones sat passively at an electric piano, saying little between songs and offering little visual punctuation during them. It’s as if she saves all her energy and emotion for the vocals.

She opened with “Turn Me On,” an old song by John D. Loudermilk, a country-pop writer whose tunes, like Roger Miller’s, often had a wry, novelty edge. You could imagine Loudermilk chuckling to himself as he put together the images in this tale of sexual yearning: “Like a flower waiting to bloom/Like a lightbulb in a dark room/I’m just sitting here waiting for you/to come home and turn me on.”

Jones, however, reached for the song’s deeper, underlying sense of desire, and she hit the target superbly, sending an immediate signal of the thoughtful, artful edge in her approach to music. She doesn’t exhibit a lot of range as a singer, sticking to a soft, melancholy tone that would make the Leonard Cohen songbook ideal for her, but her control and conviction make every note seem fresh and affecting.

After following with a version of Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” that showed more of a personal stamp than her somewhat straight reading of the country classic on her “Come Away With Me” album, Jones turned to some original material that for the most part proved equally well-suited to her approach.

Her own compositions, including the album’s title number and “Nightingale,” are pleasant but routine expressions of longing, but her musical cohorts on the album (Alexander and guitarist Jesse Harris) have provided some truly absorbing tunes. Among them: Harris’ “Don’t Know Why,” a gently understated tale of romantic second-guessing, and Alexander’s “Lonestar,” a disarming daydream.

Jones could have an appealing career if she simply concentrated on classic material, but her chief challenge is to keep finding worthy new numbers that reflect her sensibilities as she matures.

Mayer, who was joined by a three-piece band for his nearly two-hour set, was the crowd favorite.

Like Jones, he is blessed with pinup good looks, which led to lots of shrieking from the female fans near the front of the stage.

There’s a rich, fresh-faced exuberance and charm to his songs--from the self-affirmation of “No Such Thing” to the open sensual celebration of “Your Body Is a Wonderland”--that is easy to embrace.

Like Matthews and Gray, he’s a writer with an obvious gift for designing striking musical frames. To move to the next level, however, he needs to inject more character and depth to the stories inside the frames, in the manner of, say, Sting, another obvious model, or Rufus Wainwright, a young rival with more original flair. Mayer shows hints of that potential in “St. Patrick’s Day,” a winning tale of romantic optimism.

All too often, however, Mayer seems stuck in musical ideas that are both narrow and familiar. Only during his extended, blues-driven guitar solos does he seem to consistently step beyond the boundaries and reach for something deeper inside.