Enjoy.
The high life and low tones of Diana Krall
David Hayes
1 September 1997
Chatelaine
Vol. 70, No. 9, ISSN: 0009-1995
To one New York magazine, she's "a stunning blonde with smoldering eyes and a dangerous past." But to her more and dad back in Nanaimo, B.C., she's just a gifted young musician doing what comes naturally. Writer David Hayes gets to know the real Diana Krall
To understand Diana Krall, the young singer-pianist from British Columbia who has recently become the toast of the international jazz scene, you need to hear about lunch. It's a beautiful spring day in April and Krall, who has been on the road nearly nonstop for months, has two days off before beginning tours of the United States, the Maritime provinces of Canada, and Japan. As we sit down at a window table in Japonica, one of her favorite Japanese restaurants a few blocks from her apartment in Manhattan's fashionable Union Square neighborhood, she begins to rhapsodize about the sea-scallop sashimi with ponzu sauce.
"I love scallops," Krall says. "I used to taste them raw at the market, which shocked my sister. They're usually overcooked, but they're so-o-o sweet when they're not." Krall collects cookbooks, although with her schedule - she's seldom home more than a few days each month - she spends more time reading them than preparing the recipes. Now that she's performing all over the world, however, her great pleasure is sampling different cuisines. In Mexico she had fried larvae, an Aztec specialty. "I had to have a couple of shots of tequila for that one," she says with a hearty laugh.
In honor of her upcoming tour of Japan, we order the scallops, oshitashi (boiled cold spinach in soy-and-vinegar sauce sprinkled with dried bonito flakes), masago, which is spicy smelt caviar, and several orders of sushi, including unagi (grilled eel). But first, she orders edamame, which turns out to be a pile of boiled soy beans sprinkled with salt and looks like green peas in small pods. Popping one in her mouth, a blissful expression crossing her face, she says, "That's a bomb, as we say on the street."
Today, at the intersection of a serious jazz career and popular success, the 32-year-old Krall is a bomb. The New York Times called her "a superb jazz pianist and an even better singer." All For You, her tribute to the early Nat King Cole trio, which was released a year and a half ago, has been lodged in the top 10 U.S. jazz albums for most of that time. Earlier this year, it was the Number 1 jazz recording in France. At 182,000 copies sold, the album is a sensation when you consider that jazz recordings by newcomers with sales of 15,000 are considered hits.
Alternately happy-go-lucky and smoky, All For You features Krall's single-malt vocals and accomplished piano playing (backed by guitar and acoustic bass) on a collection of mainly lesser-known standards (the classic jazz repertoire of songs written by the great Broadway show-tune composers of the 1930s and '40s). A highlight: "Frim Fram Sauce," a novelty tune recorded by Cole in 1945. The sly nudge-and-wink in Krall's delivery of I want the Frim Fram Sauce with the oss-en-fay with sha-fa-fa on the side provides those nonsense lyrics with an unambiguous subtext. Yet Krall can switch gears on a song like "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," a moody, grandly romantic lament that many modern singers would drench in irony: her delicately syncopated piano lines set off a poignant reading of lines like I walk along a street of sorrow/The boulevard of broken dreams....
Krall's own dreams are largely intact A year ago, she was part of a star-studded 70th birthday celebration for one of her mentors, the legendary bassist Ray Brown; a few months earlier, she was a soloist in a Carnegie Hall tribute to jazz great Ella Fitzgerald. She was nominated for a 1996 Grammy Award (losing to jazz's reigning diva, Cassandra Wilson); in last year's readers poll of favorite artists conducted by Down Beat, a leading jazz magazine, Krall placed third - ahead of Ella. ("That's just stupid," says Krall. "What that's called is 'Who's-the-flavor-of-the-month?'")
Krall is slim and blond, with green eyes and a heart-shaped face. Her features are strongly sculpted; she has a long nose and prominent jaw. She's lovely, but not the kind of glamorous beauty that makes crowds part at her approach. Try telling that to the reviewers. According to The New York Times, she resembles "a cross between Drew Barrymore and Rickie Lee Jones." The Village Voice called her a "young Lauren Bacall" and a Time magazine reviewer wondered whether Sharon Stone had wandered on-stage. Apparently inspired by pulp detective novels, a New York magazine writer described her as "a stunning blonde with smoldering eyes and a dangerous past."
Krall cringes at this media-generated image. "Strangers have come up to me and said, 'How old are you?'" she says, sitting earlier that morning in her small loft apartment. Rolling her eyes, she takes a slice of cantaloupe from a fruit plate she's prepared for us and pops it into her mouth. "One interviewer said, 'I've never seen anyone that skinny sing like that.' It gets a little out there. Finally I understood they were quote unquote 'astonished' at how I looked for the style of music I play and how I sound."
To anyone who really knows Krall, neither is much of a surprise. Born and raised in Nanaimo, B.C., Krall, the older of two daughters, was surrounded by the sort of music that now makes her reputation. Relatives on both sides of her family were musical (a great-great-aunt performed in vaudeville in New York). Her father, Jim, a chartered accountant, and her mother, Adella, an elementary school teacher and librarian, played piano and sang, and her father has an enormous collection of records and sheet music. Family gatherings centred around the piano, with the Kralls singing everything from Fats Waller and Bing Crosby tunes to hymns.
Studying piano as a child, Diana was unusually gifted, but when the town's top teacher told her mother that she had the potential for a career in jazz or pop music, Adella Krall recalls, "I just smiled and thought, well, that's nice of her to say but Diana's going to university. I didn't want her playing in bars. I didn't have much regard for music as a career."
To Krall's good fortune, Bryan Stovell, a bassist who could himself have had a professional career had he not favored family life and teaching, ran the senior band at Nanaimo's Dover Bay High School. Stovell remembers his astonishment at Krall's piano playing on a local cable TV show: "Anyone in jazz knows to look for that special sense of timing and swing. It's subtle, but when someone has it, you know it. Diana unquestionably had it." Krall was a year away from high school at that time and, Stovell says, "I was waiting in glee for her to arrive, like the basketball coach who knew he was getting a teenager who's seven feet tall and coordinated."
In one sense Krall's girlhood was typically small-town and middle class - hanging out at the beach in summer, skiing in winter, listening to Peter Frampton and Supertramp, building a model rocket with a neighbor and dreaming of becoming an astronaut. But she was also obsessed by music half a century old, hooked on Marx Brothers movies and, at 15, playing piano in a local restaurant. By adolescence, Krall was stirred by a vague restlessness that would later coalesce into ambition. "I felt different," she says today. "I remember thinking there's so much I want to do. I always knew I wanted to play music, but I didn't know how to get it out."
By 17, having been ably tutored by Stovell, she won a scholarship to the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied for 18 months before returning to Nanaimo. Her big break came two years later. In 1983, while she was attending a jazz camp held outside Seattle, drummer Jeff Hamilton, who was with the L.A. 4, an influential west coast jazz quartet, heard her play. A few weeks later, when the band performed at a Nanaimo jazz club, Hamilton brought bassist Ray Brown to hear Krall performing down the street.
The musicians were invited to Krall's home for dinner and afterward, a few pulled out instruments and played. Brown, something of a jazz patriarch, who was once married to Ella Fitzgerald and famous for spotting new talent, was impressed. And Hamilton told her parents that their daughter could "make it in jazz." Adella Krall, who had worried about Diana's future in a business known for its disappointments and drugs, remembers thinking approvingly: "These musicians have distinguished careers. They're pretty real people." With Hamilton's and Brown's blessing, the trajectory of Krall's career was set, although one thing is surprising. Considering Krall's success is based as much on her voice as her piano playing, at this time she never publicly sang at all.
Most young girls don't pray for rich dark altos; it's a voice that needs growing-into. As a child, Krall hadn't thought about hers one way or the other until she tried out, at age 9, for a local youth choir. The teacher, who wanted girls to be sopranos, rejected her because her voice was too low. Chastened, Krall rarely sang until more than a decade later when, at Ray Brown's and Jeff Hamilton's suggestion, she moved to Los Angeles in 1984 to study with pianist Jimmy Rowles.
A top accompanist backing the likes of Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee, Rowles was also a singer whose strength was his passionate and stylistic approach to a song. With his encouragement, and because she found it easier to get gigs if she sang a few songs, Krall began developing her vocal chops. Three years later she moved to Toronto, then to New York. For a while she commuted to Boston, where she worked with a trio, gaining valuable experience.
By the mid-'90s, Montreal-based Justin Time Records had released her first CD, Stepping Out. A year and a half later GRP, one of North America's foremost jazz labels, signed her and released Only Trust Your Heart, which featured Ray Brown, among other jazz stars. By the time she recorded All For You, with guitarist Russell Malone and bassist Paul Keller, Krall's piano playing and, especially, her singing had become confident and identifiably her own. Her latest album, Love Scenes, is about to be released.
But her growing celebrity hasn't made much of a dent in the small-town girl. "I don't consider myself in the league of Sarah Vaughan or Cassandra Wilson, who really have great instruments," Krall says in her characteristically self-deprecating way. She is reclining on her off-white two-seater couch, a relatively recent acquisition. In the loft upstairs, an old bed needs replacing and she hasn't found the time to put down a new rug. She laughs, then adds, "I just sing the songs and do what I can with what I have."
For more insight, I talk to her producer, Tommy LiPuma. LiPuma, who also produced Natalie Cole's platinum-selling recording Unforgettable, is president of GRP/Impulse Records. "It really takes a certain type of individual to sing standards," he explains. "A great vocalist takes a song that's been done hundreds of times and makes it theirs. But many contemporary singers don't have a sense of how to phrase standards. Diana approaches them the way the singers of the day approached them, and then interprets them in her own style."
In the midst of the exhilarating and frantic pace of the past 18 months, Krall was brought back to earth by the death of her friend and teacher, Jimmy Rowles, at the age of 77. At the same time, her mother was in hospital battling bone-marrow cancer. Thus far her mother is recovering remarkably well; last spring she accompanied Krall to a dinner at the White House in honor of Jean Chretien. "You know," Krall says reflectively, "It was an ironic year. The best things and the worst things were happening at the same time. Carnegie Hall and Time magazine and all that is great, but when this kind of stuff is going on, you realize that your career and the media attention are not the most important things."
Stepping out of Krall's apartment building, we walk along 14th Street on our way to the Japanese restaurant. As we cross 7th Avenue, she points to a small furniture store. "I moved into my place a few months ago but was never in New York long enough to furnish it. One day, I just walked in, saw that sofa that's now in my living room, and said, 'I'll take it.'" A few minutes later she stops to window-shop at a housewares store. "I love these kinds of places. I love anything to do with cooking, and I love oils and body lotions and good towels. All those homey kinds of things."
Of course, a career in music means giving up what most people think of as a conventional home life. Krall is fortunate that her guitarist and pal, Russell Malone, is a veteran road warrior. Krall and Malone, whose communication onstage is almost telepathic, also talk endlessly about music, share an obsession with great food and do goofy things together, like taking a break from a recent L.A. recording session to visit Disneyland. According to Sybil Walker, a longtime friend who books Toronto's premier jazz club, Top O' the Senator, "Russell knows when she's experiencing the frustrations and loneliness and he makes sure she's all right. They're like a brother and sister. I think her remarkable stability these past two years is in part a credit to Russell."
Coming from a tightly knit family in a quiet Vancouver Island community, does she think about that kind of life? "Yeah, I would like to have a family and a house on the beach near Vancouver...." She pauses, then adds with a laugh, "But as far as that goes, I have to find a husband first. I don't consume myself with it right now. If a long-term relationship and family works with what I'm doing, then it'll happen."
After lunch, we walk along Union Square West toward the big Barnes & Noble store, where Krall wants to pick up a book. Standing on the up escalator, she says excitedly, "Hey, that's me!" Drifting in and out of the dull roar of shoppers' conversations, we hear "When I Grow Too Old to Dream," the final track on All For You. Her recording is becoming ubiquitous. Having been in New York for less than 24 hours, I've heard it in a restaurant, a record store and now a bookstore. I ask Krall if she isn't getting used to her popularity by now. Crinkling her brow, the so-called sex symbol with the "smoldering eyes and the dangerous past" thinks about it for a few seconds before breaking into a wide schoolgirl's grin.
"No!"
The Jazz Zinger Grammy has infamously thrown its share of curves in the Album of the Year category. (Remember the curious '99 nod for Garbage?) This year, slugging it out with odds-on fave Santana is out-of-left-field nominee Diana Krall, the jazz heavy hitter who plays like a natural.
Chris Willman
18 February 2000
Entertainment Weekly
Issue: February 18, 2000 No. 526
If you ask me about being a blond, I'll kill you." Diana Krall shoots me a look, and fortunately, only a look. The celebrated singer- pianist has just been through a morning of TV interviews in her Beverly Hills hotel, none focused on jazz theory. Normally, those who croon "I've Got You Under My Skin" don't stand a ghost of a chance with Grammy, but her '99 release, When I Look in Your Eyes, has gotten new life via an unexpected nomination for Album of the Year. Invariably, interviewers move beyond wanting to know how it feels to have the honor of competing against the Backstreet Boys (the showdown will be broadcast Feb. 23), and on to the subject of Krall's beauty.
"You have this very glamorous image..." begins one young female interrogator. "And some people might look at your album covers and wonder whether the record company is exploiting you.... It's like, here's this blond..."
Krall starts reeling off her rote response. "I always tell people, the more time we talk about that, the less time there is to talk about music." She explains how she's in control of her own photo sessions, and so on. But then she almost loses her cool. Does her label exploit her image? "Of course they do! They'd be idiots if they didn't! I understand [the question], but it pisses me off. It's very important that people understand that I'm not just propped up here and told what to do. I am an artist, and I am also a woman who loves to dress up and be a girl.... Plus, I don't think that I'm that big a deal anyway. I'm not Claudia Schiffer. I do what I can."
Friendly laughs are exchanged, and when the camera's off, Krall-- a diva by profession only--makes sure the interviewer wasn't offended by her slight show of pique. "Did you hear me swear in there?" she asks her publicist afterward, a little embarrassed--and still a little miffed. "I'm blond, it's a wonder my brains don't fall out of my head!" Then comes the aforementioned threat on my life.
Fair hair aside, it is fair to wonder if someone coming along who's easy on the eyes as well as ears ain't bad for jazz and the classic American popular song--art forms historically rife with sex appeal, which, in recent years, have gotten more press on the obit page than through profiles of rising hotties. It's been said that the clingy dress Krall wore as a Grammy performer two years ago did more for rekindling interest in jazz than a decade's worth of Duke and Miles reissues. But never mind how the new audience gets in the door; the rearranged old standards they're exposed to become playful, vibrant, emotionally renewed, and maybe even just a little sensual in this 35-year-old thrush's hands.
"Sex symbol?" repeats Krall, chowing down on halibut in the hotel bar after the TV crews are gone. "Oh my God! 'Uh, Mom...' " She mimes phoning the folks back in Nanaimo, Canada, having to explain this embarrassing notion. Not that she's ready to completely disavow it. "The women that I admire are like Kim Novak, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall--strong women who are very sexy. I never try to be. But I think I'm a very passionate"--long pause--"sexual person. But it should be a quiet thing."
Pianissimo, not fortissimo, is her forte. Her accomplished ivory tickling is simple and elegant. Krall's accountant dad, schoolteacher mom, and ex-Canadian Mountie younger sister all play, too; her mother would lead family sing-alongs of standards and hymns every Sunday night at Grandma's. Never imagining she'd be known as a vocal stylist- -never singing in public before age 20, in fact--Diana pursued formal piano training and eventually studied under jazz legend Jimmy Rowles. Now, like Nat King Cole, she's in danger of having her piano prowess eclipsed by her voice, which reviewers typically call "'smoky, honey- scotch,' all that stuff--they've gotta write something," she shrugs.
She wasn't always in touch with her inner smokiness. Listen to her first two, early-'90s albums, and it's almost painful hearing her try to... "Belt?" she interrupts. "Yeah, it's terrible. I was trying to be Sarah Vaughan. That's youth, though. I'm not a very powerful singer. What's Martin Short's line, when he's doing the synchronized- swimmer routine? 'I'm not a strong swimmer.' Ha-ha! I don't have a belting voice. That's why I took away drums, too, to be able to get really quiet."
She ditched 'em on her third album, the 1996 Cole tribute All for You, the LP that found her really blossoming as a singer. As she's grown more confident in her lower, more smoldering registers, the percussion got taken off probation. "Now, with the right drums, I'm very quiet."
She's no femme fatale, despite the noir look of a few album covers and her intention to take out anyone brandishing the B-word. At home, in Manhattan, she's a social animal; back in her native Canada, she's a sporty one, having indulged in bungee jumping, rock climbing, and other digit-endangering pursuits. If some of her interviewers don't know what to make of this self-avowed jock's occasional glamour, it's understandable: The last time this vein of popular song produced a looker of a "girl singer" who captured the public imagination was probably the 1950s heyday of Rosemary Clooney.
"She's better than I was," insists Clooney, who's practically adopted Krall since they met a year ago. "I think she is of the caliber of Ella and Peggy Lee. And she's a double threat, because she has what none of us did, being a brilliant pianist, too." If Krall wins the Grammy, credit Clooney, who's on a one-woman voter-calling campaign.
Krall's fifth album got that nod thanks to a NARAS "blue ribbon" nominating committee, which went ape over When I Look... in a closed listening session. Some wags assume Krall inherited the token "credibility slot" recently granted to alterna-rockers like Beck. But "Santana is darned credible," she argues. "And who am I to say that this band over here is not as serious as I am? Because if you're honest about the music and love it and doing it for the right reasons, not rewards, then you're doing it for the sake of the music." The Backstreet Boys, in a nutshell!
But seriously, don't suggest that Grammy accolades--or gold- selling status, exceedingly rare among her peers--make her a genre standard-bearer. "I'm not the poster girl for jazz. That's a lot of responsibility on one person. And there are great singers that are more 'jazz singer' than I am--Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, Vanessa Rubin, Dianne Reeves."
Yet, asked why she never covers the contemporary writers she loves, like Tom Waits and pal Elton John, Krall falls back on responsibility after all, erring on the side of the classics. "In my eyes, the music isn't retro. It's still the same story--'the fight for love and glory'.... You don't have to think back to World War II.... I think it's important to interpret the great songwriters, just like the great plays, as if they were Death of a Salesman.
"Gershwin, Porter, Berlin--these songs have been stretched, pulled, taken apart, put back together again, and had bebop invented over them. I'm asked all the time, 'Why don't you write your own tunes?' Well, you don't see Cole Porter up there blowing saxophone. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen were genius songwriters who got Frank Sinatra to interpret their music. You don't ask every actor why they're not writing their own plays."
Nor would you tell a great baseball player he ought to invent a whole new game, I suggest.
"That's a good way to put it. 'You're playing baseball--that's old! Play something new!' I might use that, if you don't mind," she says. Mind? Would Jimmy Van Heusen mind? Once an interpreter, always an interpreter.
Boradcast Transcript
Copyright: CTV Television Network Ltd. Feb 10, 1998
HOST: Lloyd Robertson; Valerie Pringle
GUEST: Diana Krall, Jazz Singer
ROBERTSON: Everywhere you look these days, Canadian artists are winning acclaim and awards in the global community.
PRINGLE: There's so many of them actually, you know them by their first name -- you know, Shania and Alannis and Celine. Canadian women particularly have become megastars in everything from rock to country to opera. And now joining their ranks is British Columbia's Diana Krall.
Diana Krall on her recent US tour. Here at the legendary Blues Alley in Washington DC, it's another sell-out crowd. But her renown has reached far beyond the traditional jazz club circuit. In Ottawa, the British High Commissioner hosts a gala to celebrate Canadian musical achievement, and Diana is a featured performer. In New York, the Canadian Consulate showcases Canadian talent, and Diana is centre stage.
She sells a lot of records and wins much critical acclaim for her interpretation of an urban American art form. It seems an awfully long way from her roots in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
KRALL: Why not? There's a lot of great artists and great things happening in small communities where it might be more difficult to perform in a community choir. You know, there are not a lot of teachers with great records and record stores that have jazz. And it might not be the centre like New York City is so --
PRINGLE: But Nanaimo keeps coming up. I mean, is it strange or not? People can come from anywhere and do anything?
KRALL: Yes. It's what you're passionate about.
PRINGLE: Krall grew up in a close-knit and musical household, her father an accountant and her mother a teacher and librarian. Both were amateur musicians, and they steeped her in the classics. But Diana developed a flair for jazz. A perceptive high school music teacher saw the promise. At 19, she was discovered by jazz great Ray Brown while she was playing in a Nanaimo restaurant. A scholarship to Boston, a stint in L.A., and she was on her way.
KRALL: I was influenced by Willie Nelson and influenced by early dance music from the Twenties. And I'm influenced by Maria Callas and Jussi Bjorling, a great Swedish tenor. I'm influenced by Welsh chorale music and Celtic music. And I listen to Jan Arden and Loreena McKennitt and Joni Mitchell. You know, music is just music and it's about emotional connection. And I think that jazz was music that was strongest for me, that I made the strongest emotional connection with.
PRINGLE: She has all the attributes for success: a single- mindedness about her music, technical virtuosity on that keyboard, that rich, sultry, slightly naughty voice, and a stage presence that no music academy can teach. Then there's that glamorous image her American handlers promote. Posters, covers -- it's even put her in with the bad and beautiful people on an episode of Melrose Place. [video excerpt] Unlike the dread Amanda, Diana is behaving herself over at the piano. Krall dismisses the image-making in a way that shows the iron will just below the surface.
Now, tell me about this -- you know, the Peggy Lee, Kathleen Turner, Sharon Stone. I can't read a review about you that doesn't mention the babe stuff.
KRALL: Everybody thinks the record's wonderful, and I get a lot of flak about the cover. So, sorry, Mom, but I'm going to say this on national TV. If I wore Birkenstocks, didn't shave my armpits, wore no makeup, and wore a muu muu, would I be more artistic? That's just a terrible stereotype. Nancy Wilson is like a mentor to me. She's always been stylish and beautiful and a great artist, and she told me once, "Honey, look your best. Look as gorgeous as you want to and sing your behind off."
PRINGLE: An impromptu lunch-time session at a Park Avenue music store. These senior jazz experts seem to indicate that the glamorous image is just fine. And it can make for funny moments.
MAN: We saw you at the Algonquin the night the guy said, "Hey, Mr. Bass Player --" [laughter] That was wild.
KRALL: "Could the fiddle player please move so we can see the pretty girl?"
MAN: Fiddle player, right -- the pretty girl.
PRINGLE: Still, as she says, the music's the thing and hers has a way of touching people profoundly. This woman spent the last moments with her dying fiance in a final duet of their favourite Diana Krall song.
WOMAN: Really an important part of our very last conversation together. We went out singing "Frim Fram Sauce" in harmony.
KRALL: I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.
PRINGLE: At 33, she's become more devoted and fiercely protective of family than ever. Her mother faces a battle with cancer.
Are you tough, though, now? Do you feel like you're tough or you're a pro or you just know your way around?
KRALL: I'm not tough. I think I'm aware and interested and --
PRINGLE: In control?
KRALL: Yeah but, you know, if you had everything together, it would be really boring and it wouldn't be anything to sing about.
PRINGLE: Career and success dictate that she live in New York but, even now, there are thoughts of coming home -- maybe when she's reached the very top.
You talk about twenty years from now, where you want to be. I mean, what do you want to do? Do you want to have a family, kids, keep playing, be world famous, what?
KRALL: I never wanted to be world famous -- ever.
PRINGLE: Okay, what?
KRALL: [laughter] I don't know. We'll see where it takes me. I'll see where I go. Yeah, I'd like to have family if that happens, if I meet someone great. But if I don't, whatever. I'm not really having time. Like, I've said that I don't really have a plan right now. And I'm enjoying playing music. I worked my whole life to do this. And yes, maybe I'll have another life and have children and a house in B.C. and do other things. Who knows? So, we'll see. I'm really happy, though. I'm lucky. I'm very lucky.
ROBERTSON: But even she makes the point, Valerie, that it really doesn't matter where you come from. You can be anything you want to be. I think there's a little Nanaimo in her, though -- sort of BC West cool.
PRINGLE: She's totally cool. Yes, she is tough, enormously talented. And you'd love the CD.
ROBERTSON: Right.
