Krall breathes new life into nuggets from the past
It would be easy to say Diana Krall has retreated into a safe comfort zone with her new album “Turn up the Quiet,” playing the all-too-easy standards of the great American songbook, a path she and so many other great jazz artists have already taken.
Her performance Thursday night at Hamilton’s FirstOntario Concert Hall was smooth and silky, but rarely safe. Krall showed that she is much more than just a smokey-voiced lounge singer with a rare talent on the piano.
Above all, Krall is a great impro- visational artist, a skilled arranger, a creative interpreter and a consummate band leader, able to draw a quartet of crack musicians who can take well-worn tunes into places they’ve never been before.
Her 90-minute set was dominated by the standards, especially ones from “Turn up the Quiet,” old favourites like “L-O-V-E,” “Blue Skies,” “Night and Day,” “Moonglow” and the evening’s beautiful closer, “Sway.”
Each song provided extended solo showcases for her magnificent band — guitarist Anthony Wilson, bassist Robert Hurst, drummer Karriem Riggins and violinist Stuart Duncan. All were brilliant, sometimes breathtaking in their subtle virtuosity.
Wilson, Hurst and Riggins have been with Krall for years. Duncan, better known for his brilliance as a bluegrass fiddle player than for his jazz licks, has now become an integral part of Krall’s sound.
Tempos changed in smooth transition, melodies merged and magic was made.
Krall’s piano worked exquisitely in and around her accompaniment, always tasteful, never overbearing, with her hushed vocals bringing the band back to the place where they had started. She was flawless, almost. “I have such a great time playing piano that sometimes I forget to come in singing,” she told the crowd after flubbing a return lyric on “Moonglow.”
The standards may have dominated the evening, but Krall proved she can also work outside the box of modern jazz.
One of the highlights of the evening was the band’s remarkable rendition of Tom Waits’ “Temptation,” starting off as a spooky shuffle and evolving into an electrifying violin-guitar call and response by Wilson and Duncan, before Krall finagled the song into a rousing New Orleans stomp.
Krall also paid tribute to Joni Mitchell with an inspired version of “A Case of You,” featuring a piano solo that weaved in other snippets of the great Canadian songwriters’ music including a taste of “Both Sides Now.”
It’s been 25 years since Krall first burst onto the scene, a young jazz saviour, scooping up Grammy Awards and selling albums by the bucketload. She did it by revisiting
the old standards and reminding us how good they were.
Now, at 5 3, she’s performing those songs with a new maturity and letting us know those old nuggets can get even better.