The Courier-Mail, Feb. 12th
Posted: 11 Feb 2005, 23:09Personally Krall
The Courier-Mail
12 February 2005
Jazz artist Diana Krall has always put her heart and soul into her music, but her latest album takes the personal to a more intimate level, writes Noel Mengel
SO YOU thought you knew Diana Krall? The warm glow of that ever-so-slightly husky vocal style, the deft jazz piano skills. The woman who grew up listening to Fats Waller, who loves Nat "King" Cole and Billie Holiday but also Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell.
Look a little deeper and you find someone you might not have glimpsed behind the glamorous photo shoots and the smooth, easy swing of her music.
The flesh and blood. And tears.
It's all there on Departure Bay, the final track on last year's The Girl in the Other Room album, which opens with elegant piano chords that are at once gentle and proud.
As the chords resolve into the verse, it's easy to picture Krall sitting at the piano and writing the song -- until now, she has been known as an interpreter of the songs of others -- and pouring her soul into the music.
It is as if she's willing every fibre of her being in there, it's so real, "the glistening of rain-soaked moss" and "going down to the Dairy Queen at dusk", the salt air and sawmills, the passing of the tugboats, the way that everyday details take on a magical, sparkling quality under the stress of momentous events.
She sings . . .
The house was bare of Christmas lights
It came down hard that year
Outside in our overcoats
Drinking down to the bitter end
Trying to make things right
Like my mother did . . .
Krall's mother, who died in 2002, is the focus of Departure Bay, as moving a song about loss and acceptance as any you will hear. It's a different thing -- although Krall, a student and fan of many kinds of music, might argue that it is not -- from finding fresh nuances in songs from the jazz repertoire.
It's personal.
One of the most insightful things about songs and songwriting anyone ever said to me is this: "It shouldn't make something a better record if it's taken from life, but I think an audience can tell when a song really matters to a performer."
This was from Elvis Costello, Krall's husband and co-author of Departure Bay, and he's right. The audience senses it.
Krall, as do many people when they lose their mother, started thinking of home -- in this case, the small city of Nanaimo, British Columbia (population 75,000) on the eastern side of Vancouver Island.
Anyone who has taken the 90-minute ferry trip from the mainland will tell you it's one of the most picturesque rides anywhere.
Now Krall has residences in New York and closer to her roots in British Columbia.
"I left home when I was 17," she says. "All I wanted to do was go to New York, be in a big city and be a jazz musician. But after I lost my mother I spent a lot of time at home, and then I started listening to For the Roses over and over again."
That Joni Mitchell album has been a touchstone for female singers and songwriters since its release in 1972, although since Krall was immersed in jazz while growing up, she came to contemporary writers such as Mitchell and Bob Dylan as an adult.
"I was listening to phrases like, `I heard it in the wind last night, it sounded like applause', and lyrics about taking taxis and trains and ferry boats and sea planes," she says. "I thought: `She's the only singer I know who sings about pontoon planes'. And I think I'm the only musician I know who takes pontoon planes.
"Joni has a house right across from where I have a house, and she has these references that are familiar to me, very specifically local. And I also started finding this fascination in the aboriginal people of the Pacific northwest and the art work, the beauty of where I came from."
Krall started writing tunes like Departure Bay, one of five extraordinary songs co-written with Costello on The Girl in the Other Room. The album also includes her interpretation of Mitchell's Black Crow, the song with ferry boats and pontoon planes.
Krall, as jazz players do, has always improvised, but in a 10-album career since 1993 she has only previously released two original tunes.
BUT the encouragement of her new husband -- Costello has been one of the most interesting and stylistically diverse songwriters in the rock world for 25 years -- showed her a different path.
"I always loved artists like Keith Jarrett, and I loved improvising but I never seemed able to retain it," Krall says. "So a lot of my writing began with a tape recorder on the top of the piano and improvising a complete piece, which resulted in songs like Narrow Daylight and I'm Coming Through.
"But I get as much satisfaction playing standards as I do writing; the stretching and twisting and reinterpreting the phrasing, vocally or on the piano, is just as interesting to me. It still kicks my arse, playing those tunes I've been working on since I was a kid."
Krall began piano lessons aged four and absorbed everything she heard in her piano-playing father's extensive collection of early recordings.
"I listened to cylinders growing up," she says. "Who do you explain that to when you are in the seventh grade? So my dad came and gave a little talk with his cylinder player and showed how it worked. I listened to a lot of these early recordings on cylinder, a lot of Bing Crosby from the '30s, and Rosemary Clooney, and a lot of strange stuff that I didn't know what I was listening to."
It certainly made a change from the usual pop-rock fare for teenagers, circa 1980. But that jazz apprenticeship has led her to a life the smalltown girl could not have imagined, working with greats like her early mentor, jazz bass legend Ray Brown, singing with Rosemary Clooney, and recording with Ray Charles.
Their duet on You Don't Know Me is one of the highlights of Charles's final album, Genius Loves Company.
Krall is in an exuberant mood, thrilled with the new band she will be bringing to Australia on tour in April, now with bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Karriem Riggins joining guitarist Anthony Wilson.
She is still on a high from their show the night previous in Rio de Janeiro, ecstatic to hear several thousand Brazilians singing along to The Girl From Ipanema in Portuguese.
"I never wanted to be put into any stylistic box," Krall explains. "Even when I did this album people were saying, `Oh, she's gone pop'. I was thinking, `What are you talking about?' It's crazy. We're improvising, we're playing jazz music!
"The beauty of a concert is that you aren't just making 12 songs on a record and you don't just go out and play that record. You go out and play who you are, how you are feeling."
And Krall has never felt better, in love, coming to terms with the loss of her mother, even to the point of planning a Christmas album.
"I used to love Christmas, the family would always get together and sing. We'd be singing carols and then a Fats Waller tune," she says. "But I was in such pain over the loss of my mother, I just couldn't face it.
"It's a long time, this process of loss. It's not something where you go, `Oh, it's been a year, get over it'. It's every day. But I remember my mother was always saying, `You can't always affect what's going to happen to you but you can choose your response'. "
And Krall's response has been to blossom as an artist, as a songwriter, as a person, the girl in the other room.
"I'm just a kid from Nanaimo, you know? I do get emotional but I don't apologise for it because I feel very deeply and passionately about my life and the people who are in it, making sure everyone is having a really joyful time. Because if it's not fun, what's the point?"
The Courier-Mail
12 February 2005
Jazz artist Diana Krall has always put her heart and soul into her music, but her latest album takes the personal to a more intimate level, writes Noel Mengel
SO YOU thought you knew Diana Krall? The warm glow of that ever-so-slightly husky vocal style, the deft jazz piano skills. The woman who grew up listening to Fats Waller, who loves Nat "King" Cole and Billie Holiday but also Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell.
Look a little deeper and you find someone you might not have glimpsed behind the glamorous photo shoots and the smooth, easy swing of her music.
The flesh and blood. And tears.
It's all there on Departure Bay, the final track on last year's The Girl in the Other Room album, which opens with elegant piano chords that are at once gentle and proud.
As the chords resolve into the verse, it's easy to picture Krall sitting at the piano and writing the song -- until now, she has been known as an interpreter of the songs of others -- and pouring her soul into the music.
It is as if she's willing every fibre of her being in there, it's so real, "the glistening of rain-soaked moss" and "going down to the Dairy Queen at dusk", the salt air and sawmills, the passing of the tugboats, the way that everyday details take on a magical, sparkling quality under the stress of momentous events.
She sings . . .
The house was bare of Christmas lights
It came down hard that year
Outside in our overcoats
Drinking down to the bitter end
Trying to make things right
Like my mother did . . .
Krall's mother, who died in 2002, is the focus of Departure Bay, as moving a song about loss and acceptance as any you will hear. It's a different thing -- although Krall, a student and fan of many kinds of music, might argue that it is not -- from finding fresh nuances in songs from the jazz repertoire.
It's personal.
One of the most insightful things about songs and songwriting anyone ever said to me is this: "It shouldn't make something a better record if it's taken from life, but I think an audience can tell when a song really matters to a performer."
This was from Elvis Costello, Krall's husband and co-author of Departure Bay, and he's right. The audience senses it.
Krall, as do many people when they lose their mother, started thinking of home -- in this case, the small city of Nanaimo, British Columbia (population 75,000) on the eastern side of Vancouver Island.
Anyone who has taken the 90-minute ferry trip from the mainland will tell you it's one of the most picturesque rides anywhere.
Now Krall has residences in New York and closer to her roots in British Columbia.
"I left home when I was 17," she says. "All I wanted to do was go to New York, be in a big city and be a jazz musician. But after I lost my mother I spent a lot of time at home, and then I started listening to For the Roses over and over again."
That Joni Mitchell album has been a touchstone for female singers and songwriters since its release in 1972, although since Krall was immersed in jazz while growing up, she came to contemporary writers such as Mitchell and Bob Dylan as an adult.
"I was listening to phrases like, `I heard it in the wind last night, it sounded like applause', and lyrics about taking taxis and trains and ferry boats and sea planes," she says. "I thought: `She's the only singer I know who sings about pontoon planes'. And I think I'm the only musician I know who takes pontoon planes.
"Joni has a house right across from where I have a house, and she has these references that are familiar to me, very specifically local. And I also started finding this fascination in the aboriginal people of the Pacific northwest and the art work, the beauty of where I came from."
Krall started writing tunes like Departure Bay, one of five extraordinary songs co-written with Costello on The Girl in the Other Room. The album also includes her interpretation of Mitchell's Black Crow, the song with ferry boats and pontoon planes.
Krall, as jazz players do, has always improvised, but in a 10-album career since 1993 she has only previously released two original tunes.
BUT the encouragement of her new husband -- Costello has been one of the most interesting and stylistically diverse songwriters in the rock world for 25 years -- showed her a different path.
"I always loved artists like Keith Jarrett, and I loved improvising but I never seemed able to retain it," Krall says. "So a lot of my writing began with a tape recorder on the top of the piano and improvising a complete piece, which resulted in songs like Narrow Daylight and I'm Coming Through.
"But I get as much satisfaction playing standards as I do writing; the stretching and twisting and reinterpreting the phrasing, vocally or on the piano, is just as interesting to me. It still kicks my arse, playing those tunes I've been working on since I was a kid."
Krall began piano lessons aged four and absorbed everything she heard in her piano-playing father's extensive collection of early recordings.
"I listened to cylinders growing up," she says. "Who do you explain that to when you are in the seventh grade? So my dad came and gave a little talk with his cylinder player and showed how it worked. I listened to a lot of these early recordings on cylinder, a lot of Bing Crosby from the '30s, and Rosemary Clooney, and a lot of strange stuff that I didn't know what I was listening to."
It certainly made a change from the usual pop-rock fare for teenagers, circa 1980. But that jazz apprenticeship has led her to a life the smalltown girl could not have imagined, working with greats like her early mentor, jazz bass legend Ray Brown, singing with Rosemary Clooney, and recording with Ray Charles.
Their duet on You Don't Know Me is one of the highlights of Charles's final album, Genius Loves Company.
Krall is in an exuberant mood, thrilled with the new band she will be bringing to Australia on tour in April, now with bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Karriem Riggins joining guitarist Anthony Wilson.
She is still on a high from their show the night previous in Rio de Janeiro, ecstatic to hear several thousand Brazilians singing along to The Girl From Ipanema in Portuguese.
"I never wanted to be put into any stylistic box," Krall explains. "Even when I did this album people were saying, `Oh, she's gone pop'. I was thinking, `What are you talking about?' It's crazy. We're improvising, we're playing jazz music!
"The beauty of a concert is that you aren't just making 12 songs on a record and you don't just go out and play that record. You go out and play who you are, how you are feeling."
And Krall has never felt better, in love, coming to terms with the loss of her mother, even to the point of planning a Christmas album.
"I used to love Christmas, the family would always get together and sing. We'd be singing carols and then a Fats Waller tune," she says. "But I was in such pain over the loss of my mother, I just couldn't face it.
"It's a long time, this process of loss. It's not something where you go, `Oh, it's been a year, get over it'. It's every day. But I remember my mother was always saying, `You can't always affect what's going to happen to you but you can choose your response'. "
And Krall's response has been to blossom as an artist, as a songwriter, as a person, the girl in the other room.
"I'm just a kid from Nanaimo, you know? I do get emotional but I don't apologise for it because I feel very deeply and passionately about my life and the people who are in it, making sure everyone is having a really joyful time. Because if it's not fun, what's the point?"
