Here's something unusual in the world of music: a best-selling artist from a stable, middle-class background who's happy, content, well-adjusted, and suffers from no substance abuse:
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Another Shade Of Blues
Is She Jazz? Is She Pop? Diana Krall Says the Answer Is the Music.
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 18, 2002; Page C01
VANCOUVER, British Columbia
The lights are blue, the stage is black, silver stars twinkle and the audience waits to be soothed and told a story in song the way this woman they await can tell it.
The woman is the Grammy-winning singer and pianist Diana Krall, most recently celebrated for her album "The Look of Love," and a woman who's said by some to have brought new life to jazz.
In her signature three-inch sling-back heels, Diana Krall walks onstage, sits down on her piano bench, straightens her back and begins to play. She crosses her legs, turns to the audience and out comes a voice that makes people say she has inhaled the voices of past jazz greats and now she's breathing them out again.
Now you say you're lonely. You cried the whole night through. Well, you can cry me a river. Cry me a river. I cried a river over you.
A woman in the audience whispers her wonderment: How does Krall's voice know where to go, sink so deep into the jazz universe of broken hearts and ed dreams and then, with a turn of lyrics, a new intonation, make it feel better? How does Krall know where the hurt is?
How mysterious, that the daughter of a librarian mother and an accountant father, a from a nowhere Vancouver Island mining town named Nanaimo, would now make a claim on the soul of jazz. What dues has she paid, that her blues can be played? And listened to: Elton John phones her, Santana congratulates her, Stevie Wonder sits in her audience, and Bill Clinton has said that he is a fan. (She'll be appearing next week at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.)
"The Look of Love," which was released last September, is one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of this year. In 1999, she won a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance for the platinum album "When I Look in Your Eyes," which was among the best-selling albums in the history of jazz.
And now, singing:
You drove me, nearly drove me out of my head, while you never shed a tear . . .
None would say she's one of the those legendary musicians who were d with brilliance, racked with high-life nervous breakdowns, desperate loves and addictions -- Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Anita O'Day, Stan Getz, Miles Davis.
One asks: Ain't jazz supposed to be about that, be about people with issues, real issues, deep-down smoky issues that allow the jazz singer to reach the space in the listener and fill it with something that allows the music to keep going after it has stopped?
Now you say you're sorry for being so untrue. Well you can cry me a river. Cry me a river. I cried a river over you.
Did she cry that river? A thousand times? Anytime? The question must be asked. So now it is midafternoon in a white-tableclothed restaurant aglitter with water glasses, attentive waiters and porcelain teapots. She drinks a Diet Coke. She eats crab tail out of a tiny dish with a tiny fork.
She leaks nervous energy. She talks fast. Her thin fingers snap to a silent beat.
She seems bent on explaining something about her music and very little about herself.
"Okay," she says, "well, how many times have you been in a relationship where you were so -- " Then she stops.
A well-timed pause -- a signature Krall move.
"I mean, I don't want to tell the story of what it's about for me because it might be different for you. So if I introduce a song by saying, 'Okay, this song is this and this happened to me,' then the audience is looking at me and going, 'Wow, what did she go through?' Instead of having their own experience themselves and thinking, 'Yeah, that .' So my most important goal is for the audience to find their own stories. That's why I never talk about what it means to me."
She is like the in high school who is talented, athletic, who can sing and play the piano, but who is nice, whose parents are nice, whose sister is nice like they all live behind a white picket fence and you look for a in the story, a fault line, but as hard as you look in her face and behind her story, you can't find any, and still you wonder, where does the music come from?
She is still evolving, she says. "I want to be better. It's my big thing."
She has also said: "I've learned now that you can be joyous and be an artist."
A Canadian magazine once asked: "Is this any way for a jazz diva to act?"
You drove me, nearly drove me out of my head, while you never shed a tear. Remember, I remember all that you said.
Critics pick at Krall, asking whether she has gotten this far because she is marketed as a "jazz " with pouty lips and narrow-heeled shoes.
She says she's not packaged by a record company or anybody else.
"I've always done what I wanted to do," she says. "Wearing Dolce and Gabbana shoes has nothing to do with the way I interpret Cole Porter."
She sips tea with milk. She says: "It's the great debate -- the Krall controversy. I thought, if I had time to sit around and debate whether my legs on my album cover make me jazz or not, I'd need to get a life."
No apologies. She's no ingenue, after all -- she's attained that ageless age of enigmatic jazz musicians, her late thirties, as it happens. She has a boyfriend whom she's happy with but won't talk about. She lives the performer's life, in the world of rooms: hotel rooms, dressing rooms, greenrooms, the kind of music spots people call "rooms." It's a lonely way to get around the world, but she definitely has been around.
She has been called cautious, a musician with nothing to say in her music. That she switched too soon to singing with strings, a jazz sin, even if Ella Fitzgerald did it for album after album. People even criticized Charlie Parker when he played with an orchestra. Jazz purists don't like that sort of thing.
"Jazz singing is much more than a craft," writes Nat Hentoff, elder statesman of jazz criticism. "Like jazz playing, it is -- as Valerie Wilmer put it -- as serious as your life. And sure, there are gradations in capacities, but to merit being called a jazz singer you have to have something to say -- your own story -- as it moves you then and there. Arrangements tailored just for you -- and, in Krall's case, a carefully constructed aura of taking yourself seriously -- won't help if you don't know when and how to let yourself go."
Krall has no apologies. "If you look at Cassandra Wilson or Dianne Reeves, they don't put themselves in boxes. They don't sit there and just sing. I mean, Cassandra does anything she wants. She's like so inspiring to me. That's what it should be about. It should be about the music," Krall says.
She is still talking fast.
"The bottom line is whether or not somebody sits on this side of the table and says, 'Well, she's not jazz,' and somebody says, 'Well she's not pop, she's jazz.' I mean, what does it really matter when you put the needle down on the vinyl, so to speak. Somebody's still going to say, 'I like it,' 'I don't like it.' I think I can say one thing is, it's honest."
And the debate (along with the record sales) goes on.
John Orysik, media director of the Coastal Jazz & Blues Society, which booked Krall in the 1990s, long before she was known internationally, throws in another line of argument: "Something everybody overlooks is she is a hell of a piano player. Everybody talks about her vocals. She is a real double threat. If she stopped singing, she could be a great piano player."
Orysik says the marketing controversy doesn't hold muddy water. "In the jazz world, you cannot achieve that kind of success strictly on image, strictly on looks. You have to have the goods and she has got them."
Nanaimo is a lunch-bucket and pickup truck kind of town. So Krall is no stranger to dirty hands and the salt of the earth. What people forget about coal miners, though -- the English and Welsh coal miners who came here -- is their musical culture. They brought the brass band tradition from England, and singing from Wales. The town had an opera house and choral societies, an orchestra and symphony. Despite its appearance of pulp mills, lumber mills, coal mines and railroad tracks, the music has always been here.
Krall begin playing piano when she was 4. Her home was filled with music from her father's extensive record collection. He was an audio buff and, in his off hours, an accomplished pianist; Krall's mother was a choral singer. Diana learned music the same way other children learn nursery rhymes.
Bryan Stovell, the band teacher for Nanaimo District Senior Secondary School, recognized Diana's talent by chance. While flipping television channels, he saw a band led by one of Stovell's friends. The teenage Diana Krall was playing piano. "Diana took a piano solo and I just about fell out of my chair. I phoned my friend and said who is your piano player, and he said Diana Krall, and I said Jim's daughter? and he said yeah."
Stovell looked the Kralls up in the phone book. "Adella answered and I said, 'This is Bryan Stovell and I've gotta talk to you about your daughter.' She said, 'Why? What did she do?' "
Stovell said Diana had something that could not be taught, a rhythmic feel for placing notes, an ability to swing. "It was as if she had absorbed Fats Waller, Nat King Cole and Oscar Peterson," Stovell says. There was not much music he could teach Krall. The best he could do was make sure she got noticed, help her get into jazz festivals and summer concerts, lend her albums.
He offers his theory on where Krall's music comes from, and where it doesn't:
"I think that is a Hollywood myth that tragedies and a lot of substance abuse make jazz. To put an effort into playing instruments requires such a sacrifice. You gotta have demons to drive you to that obsession. The type of personality . . . may be the same personality that gets you into . But not Diana. She was wholesome. On the swim team. The whole works. Nice family. Really nice family."
The ferry leaves from Nanaimo for the mainland just about every hour. This is the route Krall took at 17 to get to Boston and the Berklee School of Music where she studied for two years. Then she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked with bassist Ray Brown, pianist and singer Jimmy Rowles, and pianist Alan Broadbent, "who made me cry because I couldn't sing a Lester Young solo properly: 'Do you want to be an artist or do you want to just be a . . . you know, what do you want to be?' "
The answer: "I want to be an artist."
Ray Brown, who had been married to Ella Fitzgerald and was her accompanist, made her cry, too. "It was that passion and love."
It was Rowles who made her sing, even though she thought she couldn't, thought her voice was too low. And for the next decade, she sang in piano bars and clubs.
"Training? That was boot camp. Always respect your local piano-bar player because you never know," she says, laughing. "It was a real learning place. But it was also very talk-about-lonely. I mean, that was pretty lonely, especially when you are playing in Europe, in Switzerland and places like that where I was just playing six hours. I was alone all the time, for three months at a time. It taught me a lot about being alone and also perseverance."
You can cry me a river. Cry me a river.
And now, in this restaurant that's just another restaurant among the endless restaurants of a touring musician's life, Diana Krall says she can't answer the question of what she is or what she has become in the eyes of her fans, her critics, the world.
"I think what matters to me is that Carlos Santana came up to me and grabbed me and said, 'Your music, Diana, it's here,' she says, pointing to her heart. " 'I listen to it all the time.' That means a lot to me. It's that it's about music."
The other day, Krall was riding in a car and on the radio came the song "The Look of Love."
"I asked the driver to turn it down because I didn't want to hear me."
She wants to get better than her past work. She says she wants to work on her piano, work on her voice, keep practicing, get better, be an artist.
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