MUSIC

Norah Jones, in a February photo, kept it low-key at Constitution Hall. (By Luca Bruno -- Associated Press)

Norah Jones

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Norah Jones must be perfecting the art of nonchalance. When she casually followed the singer M. Ward onstage at DAR Constitution Hall on Monday night for an opening duet, few people in the audience even seemed to notice. And as she drifted offstage to scattered clapping, Ward felt obliged to point out: "Um -- that was Norah Jones."

And that was pretty much the tone of the whole evening. Jones -- with her backup group, the Handsome Band -- was in fine form, mixing up materials from her first two albums with songs from this year's darker, edgier "Not Too Late." But it was a curiously low-key event, from the opening "Come Away With Me" to the heartfelt cover of Tom Waits's "Long Way Home" that closed the show.

Languid is what Jones does, of course; anyone who's heard her breakthrough hit "Don't Know Why" knows her mellow, curl-up-by-the-fire style (which won her the unfortunate nickname "Snorah"), and that low smoky voice could caress anyone into a trance. And in love songs like "Sunrise" and the breezy "Thinking About You," she worked that quiet magic beautifully.

But there were, thankfully, a few moments that shattered the placid calm. The bluesy "Sinkin' Soon" showed the whole band at its best, and a smoldering, jungle-jazzy version of "I've Got to See You Again"-- propelled by Adam Levy's demonic guitar -- purely smoked with sex. But the biggest applause of the night came when Jones (playing a toy piano with one hand and her concert grand with the other) sang the political anthem "My Dear Country," whose swipe at George W. Bush won appreciative cheers.

It was hard to hear much of Jones's opening act, the Portland-based singer Ward. Despite a pleasantly beat-up voice, his studiously lo-fi performance was, by the end, drowned out by the chattering of a plainly unimpressed audience.

-- Stephen Brookes

Marine Band

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The U.S. Marine Band showed a flair for the Latin tinge on Monday evening at the Music Center at Strathmore. Guest conductor Jose Serebrier led "The President's Own" in delightful performances of four works by Latin American composers, plus an extended suite that Serebrier compiled from Georges Bizet's "Carmen."

One of the composers featured was Serebrier himself, as the band's brass players presented the world premiere of his "Night Cry." Groups of brass played onstage, offstage to the left and in a balcony to the right, interacting through slow, solemn melodic lines and spare, dissonant harmonies. Though the material felt a little thin, the dialogue created a haunting atmosphere. Serebrier also contributed a zesty, pungent arrangement of Silvestre Revueltas's "Mexican Dance."

The neoclassical lightness, quirky tone colors and Brazilian rhythms in Heitor Villa-Lobos's Concerto Grosso for Woodwind Quartet and Wind Orchestra blossomed easily in the band's performance, with the fine quartet of soloists (drawn from the band) giving a particularly stylish performance of a carefree fugato in the finale.

For a set of dances from Alberto Ginastera's "Estancia," and the "Carmen" suite, Master Sgt. Donald Patterson supplied arrangements for wind band so colorful and inventive that one never missed the orchestral strings. While the Ginastera delivered high-voltage excitement (particularly the closing "Malambo"), the band really shone in the sinuous lyricism of Bizet's "Habanera" and the jaunty strut of the "Toreador Song." In particular, the flute section played an interlude from the beginning of Act 3 and the "Gypsy Dance" with jaw-dropping precision and panache. It also delivered some bravura piccolo chirping in the rousing encore, "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone