Krall is in the moment on Turn Up the Quiet
Pianist/singer pushes old standards into untested territory in return to roots
There’s a place where all great jazz musicians aspire to be. It’s a place where the rule books are left behind, where written charts are replaced by feel and swing, pushing old standards into untested territory. Some call it being “in the moment.”
It’s a place Diana Krall knows well. She heard it as a teenager when her early mentor, the late Hamilton-based jazz trombonist Dave McMurdo, gave her a Bill Evans record to play. A few years later, at the age of 22, the aspiring jazz pianist found it again at a workshop with the great bassist Ray Brown.
And you can hear it on Krall’s latest album “Turn Up the Quiet,” where the five-time Grammy winner is truly “in the moment.”
“It’s a return to something very close to my heart, which is an improvising jazz musician,” Krall, now 53, tells The Spectator in an interview from her Vancouver home.
“Turn Up the Quiet” is a collection of 11 familiar standards — songs like “Isn’t It Romantic,” “Night and Day,” “Blue Skies,” “Moonglow” and “L-O-V-E” — performed with three different ensembles of some of the best jazz musicians in the business. The music is soft and understated, allowing her smoky vocals and fluid piano playing to interplay superbly with the instrumentalists.
Krall has been touring the album in the Europe and the United States for much of the year with a crack touring band, some of whose members she has been working with for 20 years.
When the tour arrives at Centre in the Square Nov. 27, and rest assured that Krall and her band — guitarist Anthony Wilson, bassist Robert Hurst, drummer Karriem Riggins and violinist Stuart Duncan — aim to get to that place, in the moment.
“We’re still trying to get to that magical place. We never tire.”
“There’s such a depth of feeling and understanding of where we’re going,” Krall explains. “There’s not a lot of overthinking going on. You reach a certain level of experience and maturity where it’s understood that you can take it to different places and we’ll all go there together, then we can bring it back in.
“Turn up the Quiet” is not just a return to Krall’s modern jazz roots — her two previous albums were more oriented toward pop and ragtime — it also marked a bittersweet reunion with Tommy LiPuma, the producer who worked with her best known albums including “All For You,” “When I Look in your Eyes,” and “The Look of Love.”
LiPuma died at the age of 80, shortly before “Turn Up the Quiet” was finished. Nine months after LiPuma’s death, Krall still gets choked up talking about him. She says he was strong and vigorous up until a week before his death, egging her on after a hard day’s work in the studio with offers of pasta and red wine.
“It was 25 years, not only with Tommy, but with his wife Gill and their family,” says Krall, who has twin 10-year-old sons with husband Elvis Costello. “They were like my parents. We went to the White House for international jazz day and we made such a beautiful record. I’m upset that he didn’t get to see it.”
Krall takes solace in the fact that the “Turn Up the Quiet” sessions produced a total of about 50 different recording tracks, with only 11 ending up on the album. She can see the possibility of two or three more Krall/LiPuma albums coming out of those sessions.
“I’m thankful we did so much material,” she says.