The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I took the greatest songs… and changed a few things’
‘Idon’t finish my sentences,” says Diana Krall. “Some days I’m OK but then I get distracted and just...” Krall is sitting at the piano in her Parisian hotel room; while she talks, her fingers run nimbly up and down the keys, playing snatches of music as they occur to her. “My ears are tuned, always,” she explains. “I can hear seven conversations going on. In a sense it’s a problem but that’s my job, to tune in to other people, really listening and responding and having a conversation without words. Music is a secret language.”
Dressed in a sleek, black tracksuit with a single white stripe up the trouser leg, the 52-year-old Canadian pianist and singer is funny, smart and charmingly scatty company. At one point, she tries to explain the relationship between music and comedy by alluding to Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Dudley Moore, with a bit about Morecambe and Wise playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto with André Previn. I joke afterwards that her conversation has a lot in common with the rhythms of jazz improvisation. “I apologise,” she laughs. “I know it can drive people crazy. It’s just the way I think.”
“Diana has a jazz mind,” Pete Buchland, her long-serving road manager, tells me later. “You have to remember that she has been dedicated to this since she was a child. She can’t just turn it on and off.”
Krall grew up in a working-class mining community on Vancouver Island, the daughter of an elementary schoolteacher and an accountant. “We lived in my grandparents’ house, and they were all nutty,” she recalls. “They had a little Heintzman piano. They worked hard and didn’t have any money, but people would come over and there was music, and singing, and joking, and it would get really silly.”
She started playing piano at the age of four; by 15 she was performing in a local restaurant. “I was like the jukebox. But I didn’t really know a lot of the pop songs of the day,” she says. “I wanted to play jazz, which was kind of a rebellious thing.”
Shortly afterwards, she won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she was mentored by Ray Brown (the legendary jazz bassist who played with Oscar Peterson and was married to Ella Fitzgerald) and by the singer and film star Rosemary Clooney (aunt of George). She released an independent album in 1993, and has gone on to become one of the bestselling jazz artists of all time, with sales in the millions, multiple Grammy awards and eight number-one albums to her name.
Her last, 2015’s Wallflower, was her most mainstream to date, a straightforward ard set of contemporary pop op covers lifted by her soft, emotionally sincere singing. Her latest album, lbum, however, Turn Up The Quiet, marks a return rn to the classic jazz quartet tet format (drums, double ble bass, guitar and piano)no) on a free-flowing set t of early 20th-centuryry standards from the American songbook. k.
“These are probably bly the greatest songs ever written,” says Krall of tracklist that t includes Night and Day by Cole Porter and Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies. “But I’m not trying to be nostalgic. This music ic was modern when they wrote it, and it’s still modern. These stories don’t date. These chords will never get old. There is something in the architecture of the songs – you can see ways to twist and change things. Bebop was invented over these chords. They can take you from Bing Crosby to Miles Davis.”
She recorded the album in New York with her long-time studio partner, jazz producer Tommy LiPuma, who died shortly afterwards, aged 80, in March. LiPuma had worked with a vast array of talent, including Miles Davis, Barbra Streisand, Randy Newman, the Crusaders and George Benson; after spotting Krall in 1995, he guided her through her greatest successes. She gets moist-eyed talking about him.him “I’m feeling a bit thin-skinnedthin-skin at the moment,”momen she says. “I’ve hit a wall.wa I was in so much shocks when TommyTomm died I wasn’t ableab to cry. Until I go ono stage and then it doesn’td stop.”
I had watched her perform the night before at the beautiful old Théâtre Déjazet, an show postponed fromfro March so that she could attend LiPuma’sLiPu funeral. DedicatingDedic a song to her old friend,fri she was unableunabl to hold back the tears: “Twenty-five years we workedwo together. When we played, he would sit within the ensemble.ensem And after we finished,finish he would look
Jazz star Diana Krall tells Neil McCormick why music musn’t be taken too seriously