by scielle on 07 Nov 2004, 14:15
Young girl, old songs Jazz
By Paul Morley
7 November 2004
The Sunday Telegraph
Diana Krall sells a lot of records, and she's sold out four nights at London's Royal Albert Hall. Naturally her success is partly why her authenticity, as a pianist and as a jazz vocalist, is constantly called into question. With Krall, you're always fighting through the suspicion that she's some kind of fake. Is she part of a jazz tradition, or just a well-marketed, well-targeted, over-photographed footnote? And now she goes and confuses the issue even further by marrying Elvis Costello and becoming part of an irritating showbiz couple, to really wind up the purists. The good news about her Albert Hall show is that it's just her at the piano, joined by the nimble, thrusting drumming of Peter Erskine, the brainy guitar of Anthony Wilson and the forceful bass of Robert Hurst. There's no small orchestra crowding her out. In this company, she has to know what she's doing. One weak moment, and she would be totally exposed. Her piano playing is actually smart, cunning and playful, tripping lightly between broad Fats Waller fun and Monkish edge. This may also be what gets up people's noses. It can't be true, looking at her, and the ease with which she won success without appearing to pay her dues, that she can play the piano with such paced, poised grace. And sing at the same time. Sing with flawless, exquisite intensity that's part extravagant, part vulnerable and thankfully never as ditzy and whispery as her tentative, sub- jivey, between-song banter. Jazz or not, original or not, she's an enthralling romantic entertainer. As if that's not now enough for her, she's nudging out beyond the pre-Beatle American standards on which she based her early career. She's entering dangerous singer/songwriter territory with the vaguely evocative, slightly ordinary songs she wrote with husband Costello on her latest album, The Girl in the Other Room. She's singing the twisted fusion of Tom Waits and the abstracted introspection of Joni Mitchell, less imaginatively than she sings the old standards, as if she's intimidated by these songs and their writers. Somehow her gentle, faithful way with Waits and indeed Costello seems more tame and nostalgic than her thrilling deconstruction of the 20th-century songbook, the Porters, Berlins, the Gershwins. She finishes, solo, with a Fred Astaire song that, she points out, might be old, but has a special resonance this evening (the day after Bush has been re-elected). "There may be trouble ahead . . ." she begins, poignantly tracing out "Let's Face the Music and Dance" and transforming it into something beaten, spare and modern. It segues into one of the stronger tracks from her latest album, "Departure Bay", leaving us wondering whether the young girl who sang the old songs with such timeless, unbelievable authority is becoming a mature performer locating a space mid-way between Joni Mitchell and Costello, who might not sell as many records as she once did. Maybe then the hipsters will approve.