Krall says touring is hard but rewarding
Jazz artist Krall keeps her tour relaxed but swinging, Peter Hum writes.
For Diana Krall, being on the road this fall was even more challenging than usual.
By the second week of October, the Nanaimo, B.C.-raised jazz star and her band were in Paris, about four months and 40 concerts in to the tour named after her album Turn Up the Quiet, which was released in May. On the plus side, her two sons had made the trip from B.C. to France so they would all be in the same room together for a few days instead of having to FaceTime. But on the minus side, one of the 10-year-old twins got really sick.
“Then I got really sick. Then his brother got sick,” Krall says. “So we had five weeks of what every other family with kids has to deal with, but you’re touring, and you just have to accept it. I got to one city, and I was so sick, I had to take steroids.”
At the beginning of one concert, Krall sat down at the piano and before she played a note, she thought: “This is very frustrating. I don’t know what I can even do ... I was feeling so rotten.”
But what happened next makes Krall burst out laughing.
“I just looked up and there’s (Krall’s band members) Robert and Karriem and Anthony and Stuart, and they’re all smiling at me,” she says, cracking up. “I was like, whatever. Just play. We’re all having such a good time. It’s not a test. It’s music. You’re there for an hour and a half or two hours. It just takes you and your audience, and that’s the gift.”
After about a month off, Krall, who turned 53 this month, has resumed her touring regimen. She has almost a dozen Canadian dates between now and Christmas, and then in late January, intense touring resumes in the southern United States.
“The hard part is the touring and getting on the bus and being fatigued. But once you get up there, it’s something else,” she says. “I think I take more joy in performing than I ever have. I’m more relaxed.”
The material on Turn Up the Quiet likely has something to do with Krall’s positive mental state. After her 2015 album Wallflower, which focuses on covers of 1960s and ’70s pop, and 2012’s Glad Rag Dolls, which covers jazz tunes from the ’20s and ’30s, the new record — Krall’s 13th studio album — returns to the Great American Songbook staples that have been Krall’s passion since she was an aspiring jazz pianist (who didn’t even sing yet) more than three decades ago.
Krall says some of the great jazz artists and records of the ’50s loomed large as inspirations for her new record.
“I was listening a lot to all those records I loved so much. A lot of Billie Holiday with Jimmy Rowles and Barney Kessel — Songs for Distingué Lovers. Fred Astaire with the Oscar Peterson Trio, Lester Young, a lot of Teddy Wilson — For Quiet Lovers. A lot of that music is so chill and so relaxed.”
While Krall is a platinum-selling jazz phenomenon whose 23-year relationship with her label, Verve, surpasses that of all other Verve artists including her hero, Peterson, she speaks of her jazz elders with the enthusiasm of a lifelong music student.
In fact, a lesson she learned three decades ago from bassist and Peterson trio member Ray Brown even resurfaced to help her during the recording of Turn Up the Quiet.
Krall says she has a cassette tape of her taking a lesson with Brown, during which she was nervous and frustrated about a song that then was beyond her abilities to learn. Brown told her: “Why don’t you just play something you’re comfortable with?” She did, Brown joined in, and Krall recalls: “He didn’t play with me like I was a kid, a student. He played with me like it was Oscar Peterson… I just went through the roof, It was so amazing ... it was really swinging.”
Hearing the cassette tape last fall for the first time after all those years reminded Krall to play music she was comfortable with. Also she was struck that “nothing has changed in my desire to just play like that.”
Turn Up the Quiet was Krall’s last project with producer Tommy LiPuma, the recording legend who had also worked with Barbra Streisand, Miles Davis, George Benson, Paul McCartney and many others and who died last March at the age of 80.
Krall says LiPuma, who first worked with her on her 1995 second recording Only Trust Your Heart, would conclude long days in the studio with restaurant feasts that were as productive as they were filling. “The ritual of our recording process was 8 o’clock would come around and he’d say, ‘Hey, babe, where are we going tonight?’ The end of the day was as important as the sessions, where we’d have pasta and wine and sit with notepads and take notes.”
Krall is happy she took photos of LiPuma during their last session together, and that one of them appears in the packaging of her new album. Some of Krall’s photos also appear projected behind her and her band when they perform, along with evocative images by Amy Friend, an assistant professor of fine arts at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., and by U.S. environmental photographer Barry Underwood.
“We all have our other stuff that we do and love,” Krall says, referring not just to her photography hobby but also to her involvement in the upcoming Amazon animated series Pete the Cat, which in addition stars her husband, Elvis Costello. Krall and Costello play Pete’s parents.
“I had no idea it would just open up such another world for me,” Krall says of the animated show. “I’m really, really having a great time. It’s so well-written and I get the chance to play the piano the way I want to and interpret lyrics. It’s been creatively such an incredible experience.”