Jazz queen’s homage to gin-joint songbook
Krall’s latest, Wallflower, her 12th studio album and first with producer David Foster
Technological glitches are not a writer’s best friend, especially when they occur during the most inopportune moments, such as phone interviews.
In this writer’s case, the curse of the static phone line hit early and frequently enough during a conversation with Canada’s jazz queen — fivetime Grammy and eight-time Juno Award-winner Diana Krall — back in February that it prematurely ended our talk, with much ground left uncovered and the promise of both parties to reschedule.
Numerous attempts on this end were made to no avail to try and catch another 15 minutes with the 50-year-old Nanaimo, B.C., native, who is appearing with her band and a full symphony orchestra for a couple of near sellout dates Friday and Saturday at Massey Hall.
So topics left uncovered include the bout of pneumonia that forced her to reschedule tour dates last fall and the release of her latest album Wallflower, the recent passing of her father and life in a two-musician household when your husband is the prolific Elvis Costello.
However, Krall did manage to elaborate on the decision to record Wallflower, her 12th studio album and a collection of a dozen pop covers from the late ’60s through the ’80s, ranging from the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” Gilbert O’ Sullivan’s “Alone Again, Naturally,” 10 c.c.’s “I’m Not In Love” and a previously unheard Paul McCartney number, “If I Take You Home Tonight.”
“I picked them because those are songs that I know and loved when there was still vinyl and radio and you could turn a record over,” Krall explains. “They’re a lot of songs I played at gin joints, where I played piano and jazz and pop music. I started listening to Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne.”
Although it’s the latest in an intrigu- ing series of album experiments that dates back to 2004’s The Girl In The Other Room, which showcased her songwriting, and includes 2012’s TBone Burnett-produced Glad Rag Doll, a collection of jazz tunes from the 1920s and 1930s culled from her dad’s collection of 78 rpms, the sultry-voiced Krall says the concept behind Wallflower was one of happenstance.
It’s her first record with uber-producer David Foster and both played it by ear.
“I literally walked in the first day and said, ‘What are we going to do?,” Krall recalls. “And David said, ‘I don’t know. Figure it out.’ I said, ‘You’re the producer: Produce! Come up with the songs.’ David told me that wasn’t his job.”
Once that parameter was set, Krall said the album grew organically.
“I was kind of surprised and I was happy, because the process of me choosing songs was no different than choosing songs from the Great American Songbook,” she notes. “David really wanted to make a point that it was up to me to choose songs that I felt close to, not songs that he felt close to.
“So we started with ‘Desperado’ and then, it would be, ‘what will we do tomorrow? I don’t know.’ So there was a lot of late-night texting involved where I’d say, ‘I’m coming in with this song.’ ”
Another intriguing aspect of Wallflower is that most of the piano instrumentation you hear on the album isn’t being played by Krall, but Foster.
“We did it very differently,” says Krall. “I’d come into a small studio and there would be the vocal booth and David would be sitting at a piano, or in his office at a small keyboard.
“He’d say, ‘we’ll just try a song until we find the right key,’ — and it was always in a key that’s impossible for me to sing — an E, A or a B. He’d say, ‘Diana, you’ve got to play piano on this,’ and I would say, ‘no, you’ve got it.’
“I really enjoyed just being in the vocal booth and a lot of these songs I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had played the piano because they’re very difficult songs, they’re in difficult keys and it’s a very different style of playing that’s not in my wheelhouse . . . although it’s becoming my wheelhouse because I don’t have him touring with me.”
But in tackling songs such as the Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why,” Elton John’s “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word” and the Crowded House classic “Don’t Dream (It’s Over),” Krall says playing songs based on pop’s three-note chord songs structure rather than jazz’s four-note chord approach is challenging.
“It’s such a misconception that playing pop piano — that style — is easy. I’m just trying not to play the dominant 7th chord and f--- it all up,” she laughs.