Jazz superstar Krall went from granny’s to Grammys
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She grew up skipping stones near the ferry dock in Nanaimo’s Departure Bay, dreaming of escape from small-town life. She managed her teenage wanderlust by listening to her dad’s extensive collection of vinyl records and playing the saxophone in the jazz band at Woodlands Junior Secondary.
“Diana Piano” was her school nickname. “In her spare time, she eats and sleeps. Her life ambition is to replace Oscar Peterson,” the yearbook joked — it’s now priced at $1,495 by used book sellers. But when Krall carried her sultry, smoky, sensual voice and distinctive keyboard skills into the wider world, she stunned the jazz world, triggering a resurgence for the female voice.
Krall’s recording sales now top 15 million worldwide. Her work has won five Grammy Awards and been nominated for eight more. She’s the only jazz singer to have eight albums debut at the top of Billboard’s jazz albums chart.
“She is the hottest thing that’s happened to jazz in years,” said music critic Gene Lees in 1999.
Yet the beginnings were modest; singing jazz classics on weekends at her boisterous grandmother’s house because she was too shy to sing at home, despite her parents’ enthusiasm for music; free run of her father’s 78 rpm albums. Her father Jim, a piano-playing accountant, and mother Adella, an elementary school teacher who sang in the community choir — she died in 2002 — put her in music lessons at four.
They sent her to a life-changing summer jazz camp in Port Townsend, Wash. There she met the legendary Ray Brown and other celebrated musicians. Brown became a mentor. Her course was set.
At 15, performing jazz classics in local establishments, she won a scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Bos- ton. The school turns away more than 70 per cent of students who apply. After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles, then to Toronto, where she recorded her debut album, Stepping Out, in 1993, then to New York, where she released a series of chart-topping international bestsellers.
She won her first Grammy in 1999. In 2003 she married British rock musician Elvis Costello in a ceremony at Elton John’s estate. They have twin sons, Dexter and Frank.
As a little girl, Krall dreamed of being an astronaut. In 2012, she was asked to perform at astronaut Neil Armstrong’s memorial service in Washington, D.C. She sang Fly Me to the Moon.