Norah Jones was born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar in New York City on March 30, 1979, the daughter of the sitar master Ravi Shankar and the concert producer Sue Jones. Her parents separated in 1986 and she grew up with her mother in Grapevine, Texas, singing solos in a Methodist church, taking piano and voice lessons, and playing alto saxophone in the school band. She moved on to Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas and spent summers at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. At sixteen, with both parents' consent, she made Norah Jones her legal name. The music she gravitated to was jazz: she has long cited Bill Evans and Billie Holiday, and an eight-album Holiday box from her mother's shelf supplied one disc that she played over and over. At the Down Beat Student Music Awards she won Best Jazz Vocalist twice, in 1996 and 1997, and Best Original Composition in 1996.

She enrolled at the University of North Texas as a jazz piano major and sang with the UNT Jazz Singers. A chance encounter there with the guitarist and songwriter Jesse Harris, who began mailing her lead sheets of his songs, started the partnership that would later produce her biggest hit. In 1999 she moved to New York City. She sang in clubs and lounges, was for a time a member of the downtown collective Wax Poetic (two of her vocals survive on its 2003 release Nublu Sessions), and sang with the guitarist Charlie Hunter, appearing on his Blue Note album Songs from the Analog Playground (2001). In August and September 2000 she cut sessions in South Boston for the guitarist Peter Malick, who had heard her sing a Dinah Washington standard at a Manhattan club; those tracks were released in 2003 as New York City by the Peter Malick Group featuring Norah Jones. Meanwhile she was lead singer of the J.C. Hopkins Biggish Band, and a three-song demo, two standards and a Jesse Harris song, reached Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note Records. The label signed her despite some doubts about the direction her music would take. She recorded demos with the engineer Jay Newland on October 8 and 9, 2000, and four of them appeared on the sampler EP First Sessions on May 30, 2001.

Come Away with Me (Blue Note, February 26, 2002) was recorded between September 2000 and December 2001 in New York and at Allaire Studios in Shokan, with Arif Mardin producing alongside Jones and Newland. Her bassist Lee Alexander anchored a rotating cast of New York players who came out of jazz and Americana: drummers Brian Blade, Dan Rieser and Kenny Wollesen, guitarists Bill Frisell, Adam Levy, Adam Rogers, Kevin Breit, Tony Scherr and Jesse Harris, violinist Jenny Scheinman and organist Sam Yahel. It entered the Billboard 200 at No. 139 and reached No. 1 almost a year later, in January 2003. At the 45th Grammy Awards in February 2003 she was nominated eight times and won five: Best New Artist, Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Harris won Song of the Year for "Don't Know Why." The album was certified Diamond in February 2005 and has sold more than 27 million copies worldwide. In 2003 she was also a guest on NPR's Piano Jazz, singing "Don't Know Why" with Marian McPartland at the piano, and she sang lead on two tracks of the guitarist Joel Harrison's jazz reading of American country and folk songs, Free Country. She co-founded The Little Willies, an alt-country band with Richard Julian, Jim Campilongo, Alexander and Rieser, whose first album came out in 2006.

Feels Like Home (February 2004) again went to No. 1 and spent six consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard 200. Her duet with Ray Charles, "Here We Go Again," from his Genius Loves Company (2004), won Record of the Year and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals at the 2005 Grammys, the same night that "Sunrise" won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Not Too Late (January 30, 2007) was the first album on which she wrote or co-wrote every song, and the first without Mardin, who had died in the summer of 2006. The Fall (November 2009), produced by Jacquire King with Ryan Adams among the songwriters, debuted at No. 3 and was her first studio album not to open at No. 1.

The jazz connections continued alongside the pop ones. She sang "Court and Spark" on Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters (2007), a tribute to Joni Mitchell that won the Album of the Year Grammy in February 2008 with Jones credited among the featured artists. On February 9 and 10, 2009, she joined Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis's band at the Rose Theater in New York for two evenings of Ray Charles songs, released in March 2011 as Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles, with Ali Jackson on drums. She was one of the guest singers on Charlie Haden's Quartet West album Sophisticated Ladies (EmArcy, 2010), alongside Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall and Melody Gardot, and sang two tracks, including the duet "Don't Misunderstand," on the pianist Harold Mabern's vocalist-focused Afro Blue (Smoke Sessions, 2015). In 2014 she played with Blue Note labelmates including Wayne Shorter, John Patitucci, Brian Blade and Jason Moran at the Kennedy Center for the label's 75th anniversary. Between those dates she made ...Little Broken Hearts (April 2012), a break-up album produced and co-written with Danger Mouse that debuted at No. 2; Foreverly (2013), a set of Everly Brothers songs with Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong; and No Fools, No Fun (2014) with her country trio Puss n Boots.

Day Breaks (Blue Note, October 7, 2016) was billed by Jones as a return to the piano and to the sound of her debut. It was recorded live with little overdubbing and co-produced with Eli Wolf. Brian Blade played drums on most of it and the Hammond organist Dr. Lonnie Smith is credited on "Flipside." Shorter plays soprano saxophone on four tracks, including the cover of Horace Silver's "Peace" and the Duke Ellington piece "Fleurette Africaine (African Flower)," and Patitucci is on bass for three. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Jazz Albums chart. Begin Again (April 12, 2019) collected singles recorded with Jeff Tweedy, Thomas Bartlett and her working band. Pick Me Up Off the Floor (June 12, 2020), a jazz-folk and jazz-pop record that ranges into gospel, soul, country and funk, has Blade, Patitucci and Tweedy among its players; it debuted at No. 87, her first studio album to miss the Billboard top ten. The live album 'Til We Meet Again followed on April 16, 2021, and the seasonal I Dream of Christmas on October 14, 2021. From September 2022 she hosted the podcast Norah Jones Is Playing Along, improvising songs with guests that have included Christian McBride, Ron Carter and Bill Frisell.

Visions (Blue Note, March 8, 2024) was produced by the multi-instrumentalist Leon Michels. Jones plays piano, guitar, organ and other keyboards on it, Michels plays drums, bass and saxophones, and Blade, the bassist Jesse Murphy and the trumpeter Dave Guy join on several tracks. It reached No. 1 on the Jazz Albums chart and won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the 2025 Grammys, her tenth Grammy win. She issued a duet with John Legend, "Summertime Blue," in June 2025, a Christmas duet with Leon Bridges that November, and on October 9, 2026, the Christmas duet "April's Gone" with Chris Stapleton, written with Michels. A second volume of recordings from the podcast is due on November 27, 2026, as a Record Store Day exclusive. Her husband since 2014, the keyboardist Pete Remm, plays organ on Day Breaks, Pick Me Up Off the Floor and her live recordings.

Jones sings in a low, unhurried voice and plays from the piano bench in the manner of a vocalist-pianist who treats the song as the whole point. The lineage she names herself is Bill Evans and Billie Holiday, but the records built around her reach as often toward Hank Williams, Bob Dylan and Neil Young as toward the jazz songbook, and the rhythm sections on her best-known albums come from New York's jazz and Americana scenes: Brian Blade, Bill Frisell, Sam Yahel, Lee Alexander. Her taste for the piano jazz tradition shows in repertoire she keeps coming back to, which includes Horace Silver's "Peace," Duke Ellington's "Fleurette Africaine," Dinah Washington's "Since I Fell for You" and the Hoagy Carmichael ballad "The Nearness of You."

How jazz she is has been argued since the first record. Billboard named her the top jazz artist of the 2000s, and AllMusic files her under contemporary jazz, jazz blues and vocal jazz. Robert Christgau, reviewing Come Away with Me, called it the least jazz record Blue Note had ever issued, and an All About Jazz review noted that jazz purists might deny her credentials because of the folk and country in her blend. Her own catalog answers both sides: records that are folk, country, rock or garage soul in everything but the pianist's touch, and Day Breaks, Here We Go Again and her guest turns with Herbie Hancock, Charlie Haden and Harold Mabern, which are jazz dates by any definition. She is a popular singer-songwriter first and a jazz musician in particular rooms. Her work sits closest to vocal jazz and jazz pop, with the crossover label covering the country, folk and soul records.