The Sunday Times
August 5, 2007
The return of Diana Krall
Diana Krall, today’s diva of jazz, has a ‘difficult’ reputation: so, has motherhood mellowed her?
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Clive Davis
Just at the moment, it’s hard to talk about Diana Krall in anything other than a Hello! magazine tone. The girl singer, you see, is a mother now. On a numbingly hot day in Newark, New Jersey, she ensures that her twin seven-month-old sons, Dexter and Frank, are safe with their nanny in the tour bus before she makes her way to her dressing room at the city’s main concert hall.
In contrast to the artfully contrived, designer publicity stills, the Canadian singer-pianist appears much like any other woman who is coping with twins. Wearing no make-up, she looks tired. And even though she still seems in good shape, she has put herself on a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet (she sips a glass of vegetable juice as we speak) in order to lose weight for an imminent photo shoot. At 42, she realises that she has, like many women of her generation, left it late to start a family. But behind the fatigue, there is a sense of exhilaration, too. Even though her husband, Elvis Costello, is away in Europe, gigging with Allen Toussaint, the New Orleans R&B star, Krall is clearly relishing every second of motherhood.
“I was walking around with the babies yesterday,” she says, “and I thought, ‘Gosh, here I am, taking these kids everywhere.’ But I’m doing it, and they’re happy and I’m still creative. I can’t imagine being without them. I never did think I would have children. I put so much into my career my whole life. And then, when my mom was sick [her mother, Adella, died of cancer in 2002], I spent a lot of time with her and my dad over the course of six years. So I guess it was only recently I began to think I’d have kids of my own. I still can’t believe it. I’m exhausted, but I’m not unhappy. I’m just tired.”
At which point, she gives one of her husky, sardonic laughs. As she prepares to release a greatest-hits disc, this famously reserved musician – a woman who invariably attracts all sorts of “ice-blonde” epithets – is in a garrulous mood. Yes, there are still disconcertingly long pauses between some of her sentences, but that is less a result of hauteur than a combination of her natural reserve, the otherworldly manner common to many jazz musicians and her desire to think about a question before giving a response. It’s not surprising that her introverted manner – and dry sense of humour – has led to a number of run-ins with journalists. Just last month, a British reporter – who happened to be a fan – described her as “a cow”. The accusation still rankles.
If it’s any consolation to that writer, I can say that Krall was an awkward interviewee when she was more or less an unknown. I first met her soon after the release of her 1995 album, Only Trust Your Heart. It was not a particularly easy encounter. She was clearly uncomfortable talking about herself, although much more at ease talking about the music she loved, especially the records she enjoyed listening to growing up in small-town British Columbia. By the end, even though I was convinced she had the makings of a star, I also remember thinking that – with the exception of the notoriously introverted Van Morrison – I had never met a performer who was so uneasy about the very thought of being in the public eye.
Not much has changed since then – and yet everything has changed. While her first few albums slowly won over all but the most puritanical of jazz critics, Krall’s commercial stock flourished after the release of When I Look in Your Eyes (1998), and The Look of Love (2001). Since then, she has become the jazz singer of choice for people who don’t really like jazz. If truth be told, most of the albums she has made in the past decade have lacked the sheer joie de vivre and swing energy of the first CDs. Like one of her idols, Nat “King” Cole, Krall has a dual following – the jazzers and the mainstream pop audiences who hold hands to the mellow sound of Let’s Face the Music and Dance.
It is to Krall’s credit that she has managed to please both constituencies, more or less. In the process, she has surely broken down barriers for a wave of vocalists. Her live shows – even in a venue as imposing as the Albert Hall – have the relaxed, freewheeling ambience of a late-night set at Ronnie Scott’s. Right now, she seems particularly relaxed on stage. During her sound check in Newark, she joshes with the drummer, Jeff Hamilton, and the other members of her quartet.
There is serious work to be done, too. Krall patiently test-drives a new arrangement of a Rodgers & Hart ballad, Where or When, trying out a bossa rhythm and constantly searching for the simplest yet most evocative path. “You don’t want to make it sound like a college project designed to show how many chord changes you can put in there,” she explains later. “You put that one chord in there and it stands out much better. That’s the challenge: how can you make it go from happy hour to magical time?”
She is, she says, more relaxed than she has ever been. Marriage and parenthood clearly have something to do with it. So, too, does the mixed reception for her audacious recording The Girl in the Other Room, released three years ago. Turning her back on golden-age standards, she covered The Very Best of Diana Krall is out on September 10 on Verve/Universal songs by Tom Waits and her compatriot Joni Mitchell, and, with Costello, co-wrote a set of often earnestly introspective ballads. Krall had just emerged from a string of bereavements, including the loss of both her mother and Rosemary Clooney, the singer who had been “a second mother” to her. The Girl in the Other Room was uneven, yet it still hinted at what Krall might achieve with more contemporary material.
Many of her more conventional fans, though, did not know quite what to make of it, and with the next release, From This Moment On, Krall headed back to more familiar terrain. You get the impression, however, that she has no regrets about the earlier change of direction: “I’d had so much success with The Look of Love, I could have just continued on that road. But when I lost my mom, I wasn’t able to – it was just too painful for me to sing those songs. It was an irony, really. I couldn’t express myself through the songs I loved so much – they were just too .. . happy. All I listened to was Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. And it freed me of a lot of apologising for what I do. I don’t feel less creative because I interpret standards. People say, ‘Why do you sing songs by Nat “King” Cole?’ Well, I feel like I have a place there. I don’t know if I have a place in songwriting. I don’t know.” She pauses and gives a wry smile. “Well, I probably don’t.” Another pause. “For sure.”
She talks passionately about all sorts of subjects, from raising kids in New York to her passion for Eddie Izzard and for the native art of her home region. Towards the end, she has tears in her eyes as she recalls her mother’s final illness. Later, after recovering her equilibrium, she throws open her on-the-road suitcase to show me a silver bangle made by one of her favourite Canadian aboriginal artists. As she rummages through her belongings at my feet, I have to avert my eyes.
Those long silences in her conversation are partly what landed her in trouble with the British journalist. Aware of her reputation as an awkward customer, Krall is eager to explain what went wrong. The truth, she says, was that she was going through a difficult spell in her pregnancy: “I’d been sick at a yoga class, and I didn’t want to mention it. He just thought I was being rude. And, actually, I was really shy and nervous because it was my first press interview since I was pregnant. I choked and just sat there. I like talking about music, but what I do is quite difficult to talk about. You know, I do tend to have these very intense looks on my face at times like that. I guess I’m just, you know, intensely intense. And sometimes, I open up too much. And then I think, ‘Aaargh.’ ”
Those long silences in her conversation are partly what landed her in trouble with the British journalist.
see
http://www.dianakrallfans.com/phpBB2/vi ... .php?t=914
July 2006 is hardly 'last month' . The reference is so specific so the feature from then seems to be the one in question.
