StL Post-Dispatch: Reluctant diva DK takes it personally

[Bud]

Source: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entert ... personally

Reluctant diva Diana Krall takes it personally
BY TERRY PERKINS
Special to the Post-Dispatch
08/12/2004

It's been more than four years since Diana Krall performed in St. Louis, certainly a long wait for devoted fans of the Canadian-born singer-pianist who took the jazz world by storm in the mid-1990s - then crossed over to mainstream pop success soon after.

Krall's most-recent area appearance was at the 700-seat Sheldon Concert Hall in May 2000. She'll be performing at the nearby Fox Theater this Saturday to a crowd that should be approximately six times larger, certainly an indication that Krall has risen to the top in the pop-diva world.

Add the media buzz generated by her recent marriage to music legend Elvis Costello, and it's easy to understand why Krall has decided to forgo press interviews during a lengthy tour that kicked off in May. The tour will take her across North America through early September and then to Europe until early December.

Krall has become increasingly disenchanted with her encounters with the press. She did no media promotion for her 2002 recording, "Live in Paris," and has frequently said that she believes there's too much focus on her looks rather than her music. In case you may have missed one of Krall's CD covers over the past decade, she hasn't been shy about showcasing her long blond hair and statuesque, model-caliber physique.

"They're reviewing my legs more than my album," Krall told Dave DiMartino in a 1999 interview for Yahoo's Launch Web site, discussing her "When I Look in Your Eyes" release. "There were 68 threads (on the Internet) on whether Diana Krall was pretty. I don't want to sit and read that stuff about me. I want to make music. I'll talk for an hour about all these artists like Charlie Parker and Fats Waller, and they'll come up with what shoes I'm wearing."

That reaction may explain why Krall's two most recent CDs - "Live in Paris" and this year's "The Girl in the Other Room" - feature photos of her in performance or in natural settings with little or no makeup rather than the sexy glamour shots used on most of her earlier major-label releases.

Another factor has to be Krall's increasing focus on original compositions. "The Girl in the Other Room" features six tunes with music by Krall and lyrics by her and hubby Costello. Of the other songs on the recording, only one - "I'm Pulling Through," previously recorded by the likes of Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae - qualifies as a jazz standard.

The rest are covers of songwriters such as Mose Allison, Chris Smither, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and Costello - and Krall's originals more than stand up to them in terms of quality. Interestingly, this is the first time Krall has included an original on an album since she recorded the instrumental "Jimmie" on her 1993 debut, "Stepping Out."

"It's about telling stories from my own experience, instead of expressing myself through other people's words and music," Krall remarked in an interview in a recent issue of Jazz Times magazine.

Krall also freely admitted that her move away from cover versions of tunes from the great American songbook to her own compositions was aided by Costello's gifts as a lyricist.

"I wrote the music and then Elvis and I talked about what we wanted to say," Krall said in a Verve press release for the new CD. "I told him stories and wrote pages and pages of reminiscences, descriptions and images, and he put them into tighter lyrical form."

The resulting songs - especially "Abandoned Masquerade" and "Departure Bay" - reveal a personal side of Krall's life she hadn't exposed before. Dealing in song with the recent loss of her mother and her musical mentors Ray Brown and Rosemary Clooney, Krall has crafted a strong artistic statement with her new CD that moves beyond the specific to the universal in capturing the depth of human emotion.

Despite her statement in the Jazz Times interview that her new recording is "just a different piece" of her music, it's clear that Krall is moving in an interesting new direction as an artist.

When she takes the stage at the Fox on Saturday evening in the company of guitarist Anthony Wilson, bass player Robert Hurst and drummer Peter Erskine, it will be interesting to see how fans of Krall, the interpreter of familiar standards, accept Krall, the writer of original, challenging songs.


Diana Krall
With Ollabelle

When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Fox Theatre, 527 North Grand Boulevard
How much: $40-$75
More info: 314-534-1111 or www.metrotix.com