[Dixielandjazz] Diana Krall

[Robert Ringwald]

Diana Krall

Serious Standards
Diana Krall looks like a dream, but the ballad singer's talent for jazz is very real.
by Juan Rodriguez
Montreal Gazette, June 18, 2011
First, there are the numbers: Diana Krall has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide,
including 6 million in the U.S., more albums than any other jazz singer of the 1990s
and 2000s. She's the only singer to debut eight albums atop the jazz charts. Thus
far, she has won three Grammy Awards and eight Junos, scoring nine gold, three platinum,
and seven multi-platinum albums.
Then, there are the tie-ins and associations: The ads for Lexus luxury autos, for
Rolex watches, the countless magazine covers. In 2008, Nanaimo Harbourfront Plaza
was renamed Diana Krall Plaza. Barbra Streisand asked her to produce her last album,
in 2009. Clint Eastwood, a fan and friend, featured her music in True Crime. And,
of course, there was the marriage to Elvis Costello at Elton John's estate.
Finally, there are Krall's looks: blond, sultry, in classic stylish wardrobe, the
little black dress or the strapless gown, "glamorous and amorous," to paraphrase
'S Wonderful, the Gershwin song that opens her best-of album. You'd have to go back
to Julie London to find a jazz ballad singer so aggressively marketed as a sex symbol.
What's more, her success opened a lucrative market for retro stylists, inspiring
a slew of other glamourpusses (like Norah Jones and Jane Monheit) to enter the fray,
to various degrees of commercial success.
It's not supposed to be this way for a genuine jazz singer. Besides, how could a
white-bread from the Vancouver Island city of Nanaimo measure up to the legacies
of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, who overcame
various forms of racial discrimination? And how could she have the chutzpah of ostensibly
imitating, in the form of a tribute album, the acknowledged master of the piano-guitar-bass
trio format, Nat King Cole, on her third album, All for You, breaking through to
sell 100,000 copies within months? "Has Diana Krall gone pop?" asked a Globe and
Mail headline. Ergo, she's not a real jazz singer, right?
Wrong. Welcome to yet another jazz controversy over "purity" and preconceived notions.
Jazz is full of critic-generated brouhahas, which have more often than not dragged
the music into a ghetto ruled by those "in-the-know."
Diana Krall is a polarizing figure who breaks conventional wisdom on what it means
to be a serious jazz artist.
That sentiment was echoed by a self-described "aging jazz singer," who recently blogged:
"I almost felt it was time for me to stop singing because I saw so many younger singers
with more beauty than talent making an impression. Unfortunately, it's a fact of
life that some people (many of them men) will buy albums because they can imagine
a beauty... singing to them. I'll never forget the spectacle of a friend's husband
(who never much cared for vocalists) going gaga over a video of Diana Krall and playing
it over and over again. It was pretty obvious that Krall's music was secondary."
Krall was criticized by Gary Giddins, the Village Voice's arbiter of jazz taste,
for wrapping The Look of Love album in the airy satin-pillow-plush arrangements of
Claus Ogerman, whose trademark lushness -- which comes perilously close to sounding
like Muzak -- has graced albums by no less an artist than Antonio Carlos Jobim. (Then
again, jazz critics have always had a thing against Ogerman, whom Giddins characterized
as a "menace." I happen to love Ogerman's sound.)
A measure of how Diana Krall takes chances and rises to the occasion will be her
three-night solo stand -- just her at the piano -- at Theatre Maisonneuve, June 26
to 28. It's one thing to do this in a club (although a bassist is usually needed
to maintain a rhythmic pulse), it's another thing entirely to create an intimate
club-like atmosphere in a large hall.
Though she has played the Montreal jazz fest on numerous occasions -- debuting in
1995 in her Nat King Cole tribute trio, a year later at the Spectrum for her first
filmed concert, in 1999 with 30 musicians, in 2004 at the Bell Centre celebrating
the festival's 25th anniversary -- she has not done a solo engagement at the fest.
Festival artistic director Andre Menard came up with the idea for her: three nights
that should give her the opportunity to make changes in repertoire and different
approaches to the moment. A mini-musical laboratory in velvet.
In his intensely discriminating Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,
Will Friedwald reiterates the three reactions to the huge success of Diana Krall
over the last two decades:
"First, that she's really great, and deserves all the attention and acclaim that
she's received. (This is not exactly my opinion, but I do have to respect the taste
of some of those who have expressed it, such as Johnny Mandel and Tony Bennett.)
Second, that she's a total sham in a little black dress and high heels, foisted on
the public by astute promoters, largely by virtue of her supermodel appearance. (This
opinion is inevitably put forward by other, less successful would-be singers, whose
mouths are so filled with sour grapes that they can hardly sing themselves.) Third,
that she's somewhere between the two poles -- that she is, if not the greatest thing
since sliced bread, certainly one of the more wonderful (and, correspondingly, more
popular) performers of jazz and standards currently active, that she not only has
a lot of talent but works hard and is constantly improving her craft, and further,
that her success bodes well for the future of this music. Speaking personally, I
started with the second opinion, have been very comfortable with the third for a
few years now, and am starting to veer toward the first."
Krall herself shrugs off the criticism, noting that when she was a teenager she adorned
her bedroom wall with posters of Charlie Parker and Peter Frampton: "But for you
jazz police out there, don't worry -- I arranged them so they couldn't see each other."
Such objections to the so-called corrupting influence of commerce (ugh) were not
raised in the decade or so -- the big-band era of the 1930s and '40s -- when jazz
really was America's popular music. What the naysayers conveniently forget is that
Ella, Sarah and Dinah all had big pop hits, and they all dressed glamorously. They
all appeared on television regularly.
What's forgotten is that Krall started out as a pianist who had to be talked into
singing by Jimmy Rowles, who for years was Fitzgerald's accompanist. She describes
the piano as a guide to her vocals, a bold complement to a limited contralto.
She imbues the songs with subtle (yet adventurous) nuance -- really, in the jazz
tradition -- rather than overt "trademark" mannerisms, the death trap for so many
female singers these days. She makes no attempt to "sound black" by adopting blues
or gospel tinges.
She compensates with canny use of space and silences, restraint, breezy warmth, and
a devotion to follow the groove -- even when that groove proceeds at a snail's pace.
Like Nat Cole, her piano and voice are in total sync.
While sales figures prove her popularity, getting respect from the jazz police is
another matter. Of course, she cares about respect from people she looks up to but,
in another sense, coming from polemicists with axes to grind, she could care less.
Born on Nov. 16, 1964, in Nanaimo, B.C., she was raised by musical parents; her mother
sang in the community choir, her father played stride piano and was an avid collector
of sheet music and old 78 rpms, and turned her on to Fats Waller.
Her other heroes included Nat King Cole, Teddy Wilson and Earl Hines, all of whom
influenced her innate ability to establish rhythm (albeit her inimitable languorous
rhythm). Her preferred format -- piano, guitar, bass -- comes straight from Cole's
famous trio of the '40s.
(While most people remember Cole for his velvet voice, he was a groundbreaking, absolutely
fearless and swinging pianist who conjoined the worlds of swing and bop.)
She was discovered by Nanaimo School District music teacher Bryan Stovell, who developed
in her a work ethic that amazes to this day. Two other Nanaimo natives, trumpeter
Ingrid Jensen and her younger sister, Christine (saxophone, composer), looked up
to her hard-won progress and were inspired to follow her dogged path -- to great
success, too.
Krall started gigging professionally at age 15, and won a Vancouver Jazz Festival
scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she met drummer
Jeff Hamilton and bassist-orchestrator John Clayton, who suggested she move to Los
Angeles and with whom she recorded her debut album, Stepping Out, for Montreal's
Justin Time label. She stayed in L.A. for three years, parlaying a Canada Council
grant to study in Los Angeles with Jimmy Rowles. She also met up with the bass pioneer
Ray Brown, who became another mentor.
She was already 26 before she started singing professionally. "I didn't have the
confidence," she once said. "Too much listening to Sarah Vaughan, I guess."
In 2000, she opened a tour with Tony Bennett, another challenge given the comparison
factor with Mr. Ballad himself. "About the only dumb thing that Krall has ever done,"
Friedwald writes, "is decline Tony Bennett's generous offer to share an album with
him, something that no other vocalist had the opportunity to do up to that point."
A forward-thinking musician, she has remained seemingly unaffected by the trappings
of stardom -- or the glamorous image she insists is her doing and not the work of
her "handlers." (Perhaps we should replace the word "glamour" with "impeccable good
taste.")
The historian and critic Ted Gioia (author of the newly revised The History of Jazz)
chided her recently for crediting two hairdressers, two makeup artists and one wardrobe
assistant in the liner notes to 2006's From This Moment On. "Ah, how times have changed...
how did Billie Holiday get by with just that gardenia? Where was Ella's entourage?
Bessie's beautician? Sarah's stylist?"
Yet Gioia, in an online survey (at jazz.com) of female jazz singers, gives full props
to Krall's talent: "A thousand vocalists have ended up on the boulevard of broken
dreams by trying to resuscitate 'S Wonderful or Let's Fall in Love. These songs have
been so picked over that there is hardly any meat left on their bones. But Krall
avoids all the traps here. She doesn't lapse into imitation of her predecessors.
She doesn't try to out-scat Ella or hit higher notes than Sarah. She doesn't get
cutesy or treat the song with museum-like reverence. Instead she does just what we
want her to do -- namely, probe the emotional insides of these melodies. She lives
the song, and does it with such honesty and immediacy that we forget whether the
song was written in 1938 or 1968. It sounds like she composed it on the piano this
afternoon before showing up at the gig."
Krall "makes it seem so simple," Gioia continues. She "has established a distinctive
voice of her own. She has already earned her own wing in the pantheon of ballad singers."
Some critics compare her unfavourably to such overtly "creative" and idiosyncratic
singers as Cassandra Wilson and Shirley Horn. And yet that is like comparing apples
and oranges.
She's coolly emphatic about the philosophy and the lexicon of love. The look of love
is no mere glance through her eyes. She's intimate in a conversational way about
that ephemeral -- indelible, incredible -- moonglow atmosphere, instead of bludgeoning
you with it. It's as if she's asking "Did you ever feel this way, too?" She's marvellously
candid yet open-ended with her audiences. She's the modern-day girl next door.
German critics and historians Joachim-Ernst Berendt and Gunther Huesmann, in the
seventh edition of The Jazz Book, hail her "slightly understated phrasing full of
surprises. Krall succeeded in reinterpreting the tradition of American jazz standards
with a deep understanding of the texts and an irresistible articulation. Her style
represents a very attractive, unaffected type of singing. Krall has a phenomenal
feeling for using her voice to explore the depths of the emotional presence in a
song's lyrics. She makes room for all the facets of human feelings and passions,
with fragility, a slight coarseness, seductiveness, and little vocal growls, all
filtered through her typical coolness."
Berendt and Huesmann maintain that Krall "is perhaps as significant as a pianist
as she is as a vocalist. She expands and comments on her singing with a piano style
that sparkles with improvisational wit and spontaneous lightness."
"I owe all that to Jimmy Rowles," she said. The piano helps the singing "catch fire."
To critics who say she milks nostalgia for the classic American Songbook, she replied:
"The stories of love and romance, loss and loneliness, have always been there and
always will be."
____________
Diana Krall performs June 26 to 28 at Theatre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts, as part
of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. All of the shows are sold out.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
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