Akron (OH) Beacon: By Diana Krall

[Bud]

Jazz singer adds her own songs to impressive repertoire. They have clear spousal influence

By Malcolm X Abram

Beacon Journal staff writer

Diana Krall has just gotten a lot more interesting.

The 39-year-old singer/pianist has built a wildly successful career as a jazz chanteuse, applying her smoky voice and tasteful piano improvisations primarily to tunes from ``The Great American Songbook'' and jazz standards. Krall's aggressive marketing never lets potential buyers forget that the leggy blonde is easy on the eyes.

Krall has become that most rare bird in jazz, a multi-platinum selling artist who has crossed over to the mainstream, making her arguably the most famous jazz singer on the planet.

But up until 2004, the Canadian-born Krall's notoriety has been based on coolly interpreting proven material.

Hundreds of singers, better and worse than Krall, have been singing the same songs for decades, and anyone unimpressed by yet another take on Cole Porter may have wondered what all the fuss was about.

But when the Grammy nominee steps to her piano at Blossom on Saturday, she will be a different performer. She'll surely play all the ``hits,'' but the singer will also have something new in her arsenal, original songs.

Her latest album, The Girl in the Other Room, is the first to feature Krall's own tunes, co-written with her new husband, Elvis Costello, whom she wed last December, as well a few covers that don't quite fall under the Great American Songbook rubric. The album is still rooted in jazz, but the opening song, Mose Allison's bluesy midtempo Stop This World, immediately lets listeners know that this won't be standard Krall.

``I finally wanted to do more than just interpret material. For over a year and a half I was feeling that I needed to become more aggressive in my work. I needed to change,'' Krall told the New York Daily News in April.

``For me, I can't say I was fearless in doing something; I think it would be lying to say that I was. But I would say that working through it was cathartic for me,'' she said to Copley News Service. ``Not only from a lyrical place of personal expression, but from a musical place of digging back down to my time spent with Jimmy Rowles, after almost 20 years.''

Rowles, who died in 1996, was a longtime sideman and understated soloist for jazz greats such as Billie Holiday, Woody Herman and Benny Goodman. He was also Krall's friend and mentor during her stay in Los Angeles in the 1980s after she left the famed Berklee School of Music in Boston after two years.

It wasn't just the influence of Rowles that spurred Krall to deviate from the tried and true formula she and longtime producer and industry legend Tommy LiPuma had crystalized.

In a two-month span, Krall lost her mother, Adella, to multiple myeloma (cancer of the immune system) and two other friends and mentors, bassist Ray Brown and singer Rosemary Clooney.

For a time, Krall locked herself away in her Vancouver summer home listening to her father's vinyl record collection of classic jazz as well as records by Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt, both of whom are represented on the new disc.

Krall met Costello while the two were co-presenting an award at the 2002 Grammys. She told the singer-songwriter that she wanted to cover songs from his Tin Pan Alley-influenced album Imperial Bedroom, but was having trouble with arrangements. The two began talking and Costello helped Krall through her mourning and sparked her desire to write original material, taking Krall's ideas and stories and writing words to Krall's music.

``He's the lyricist in the family,'' she said. ``I told the story. He wrote the script.''

The script turns out to be pretty good, too. The smoky I've Changed My Address, inspired by Rowles, features Costello's eye for detail: ``I'm driving back across the bridge, red light is hitting the rear view, and he'll wonder whether, blond hair cascades on black leather, since then I've changed my address.''

On the Joni Mitchell-esque Departure Bay, Krall sings of the last Christmas spent with her mother and family: ``Last year we were laughing, we sang in church so beautifully, now her perfume's on the bathroom counter and I'm sitting in the back pew crying.''

On Narrow Daylight, Krall, who said she was emotionally exhausted while writing and recording the album, allows her usually cool voice to crack and adds a husky rasp to her vocal repertoire. For Krall to share her personal pain through her music is one sign that the singer, who hates doing interviews and does her best to keep her private life private, has found a way to open up to her own muse and anyone who cares to listen.

In addition to the six originals, The Girl in the Other Room, whose title refers to the way in which the songs were written with Costello in one room and Krall in another, also features some interesting covers. Aside from the Allison tune, Krall gives Tom Waits' Temptation a nice, vaguely Latin groove with a lightly funky solo by bassist Christian McBride and some deliberate, winding fretwork from guitarist Anthony Wilson.

She plays up the libidinous side of Bonnie Raitt's take on Love Me Like a Man. She also pays tribute to Mitchell, a fellow Canadian and major influence, with a straight cover of Black Crow, providing more solo space for Wilson's tasteful guitar playing as well as some fiery soloing from Krall.

The album may not be a radical musical departure for Krall, as jazz is still at the root of everything she plays, but there's always the chance that some of her fans may not be entranced by Costello's verbosity or melodies with which they aren't already familiar.

Krall has not ruled out returning to standards, but is not worried about losing fans.

``Time changes things,'' she said. ``And without apologizing for anything, it's time to move forward -- not to try to cling to something that you did in the past,'' she told the New York Times.

But that doesn't mean Krall is leaving behind the songs and sound that made her. However, life experience, creative restlessness and a career that has already defied the odds have made carefully charting an upward career trajectory less important.

She told the Times: ``I think because of the age I'm at right now, approaching 40, my priorities are changing a little bit, even though I'm as anxiety- ridden and neurotic as ever. I don't want to cling to something that I know works. But I'm not going to rebel against it, either. And if I was to do another standards album, there'd be no guarantees about that either. Nobody ever knows what's coming next; there's no crystal ball.''

Source: http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/living/8999481.htm?1c

[Coda]

Bud, thanks for posting this article. I've got to give this writer credit for a masterful job of using quotations (and properly attributing them) from other sources to provide a pretty meaty article without his having interviewed her directly.