How time flies. When Diana Krall made her first headline appearance in London back in the Nineties, she played to a roomful of people at Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho. It was a memorable night, but there was not a member of the paparazzi to be seen. Today, a fully fledged member of the entertainment aristocracy, the Canadian singer-pianist will step out in front of the crowds at Kenwood House.
In May her extraordinary career took another implausible twist with the announcement that she had become engaged to Elvis Costello. The news followed a difficult period in which she lost her mother to cancer and also had to contend with the deaths of two of her older friends and guides, the singer Rosemary Clooney and the bass player Ray Brown.
It is strange to think how little Krall’s act has changed since that first show in London. While the two studio albums that made her a celebrity — When I Look in Your Eyes and The Look of Love — came drenched in superfluous string arrangements — Krall the live performer has remained loyal to her roots. The set she played on her last visit to the Albert Hall was not really so different in mood and pace from the swing display she turned on in Dean Street all those years ago.
No matter how hard the image-makers try to repackage her, Krall remains a musician at heart. As she told one interviewer last year, while she was recovering from the shock of meeting another of her fans, the rock guitarist Carlos Santana, at a Grammy awards party: “The way I’d describe my feelings is that I am still a 15-year-old kid looking over in awe at my mentors, namely the drummer Jeff Hamilton, and the bass player John Clayton, who are now my bandmates, and whose records I used to play along with when I was a teenager.”
Although the ballad sequences have grown longer, she still paces her shows like a jazz gig. She clearly enjoys soloing at the piano, and her musicians get plenty of space, too. In a perverse way, it was encouraging to hear, as I did after the last London shows, that one big-time TV producer was so disappointed with Krall’s relatively wayward style that he almost decided against booking her.
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Her ascent to stardom began with the release of Only Trust Your Heart in 1994. Although her debut album, Steppin’ Out, had seen the light of day a little earlier, her second effort was the first of her recordings to be marketed internationally. I can still remember groaning at the cover photo of what I assumed would be yet another glamorous but bland cocktail singer. It took only the first few minutes of the opening track — a cover of the Louis Jordan hit Is You is or is You ain’t My Baby — to lay all those preconceptions to rest.
Krall won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston when she was 17. In her early twenties she drove south to start a new life in LA, taking lessons with the renowned jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles. Later, she endured what was by all accounts a joyless few months working piano bars and hotel lounges across Europe.
“I spent a lot of time alone, without knowing anybody,” she has recalled. “I was in Switzerland, playing in the Hotel Central in Zurich and nobody talks to you. Nobody made an effort to say, ‘How are you?’” One person who did strike up a conversation with her was a jazz trombonist called Vince Benedetti. He met Krall while moonlighting as a taxi driver in Zurich in 1988 and persuaded her to join in a recording session. The album surfaced this year as Heartdrops: Vince Benedetti Meets Diana Krall. Even if the original material is of less than classic status, it gives a rare insight into Krall’s emerging talent.
Today, of course, she moves in much more exalted company. Some more curmudgeonly critics wonder aloud whether she even qualifies as a jazz singer any more. (Strangely enough, Krall has been known to ask herself the same question: “I love the true jazz singers of today, but I don’t consider myself to be a jazz singer,” she told one interviewer.) But then the same complaints were sometimes made about Ella Fitzgerald. Krall certainly has no need to feel guilty.
Diana Krall plays Kenwood House, London NW3, today (0870-890 0146)
CV: Diana Krall
Born Nanaimo, British Columbia, on November 16, 1964
High point Although her breakthrough came with the lush When I Look in Your Eyes, fans might opt for the svelte Nat King Cole tribute All for You
How to reach out to an audience “Simplicity, I think, is the key. I’m not worried about playing fast. You can’t go out there trying to win any races. The music has got to be honest”
What’s next A move into acting with an appearance in Woody Allen’s movie Anything Else. She will also sing I Get a Kick Out of You in the Cole Porter biopic Just One of Those Things