lossless

Review by Scott Yanow

Vocalist/pianist Diana Krall was a very hot property by the time this Impulse CD was released. Teamed in a trio with her regular guitarist Russell Malone and bassist Christian McBride, Krall here mostly emphasizes ballads having something to do with love. She is at her best on “I Don’t Know Enough About You,” “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You,” and “How Deep Is the Ocean.” However, Krall’s earlier Nat King Cole tribute had more variety in tempos and moods and is recommended first. A decent but not essential release.

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Review by Thom Jurek

While the jazz fascists (read: purists) may be screaming “sellout” because Diana Krall decided to record something other than standards this time out, the rest of us can enjoy the considerable fruit of her labors. The Girl in the Other Room is, without question, a jazz record in the same manner her other outings are. The fact that it isn’t made up of musty and dusty “classics” may irk the narrow-minded and reactionary, but it doesn’t change the fact that this bold recording is a jazz record made with care, creativity, and a wonderfully intimate aesthetic fueling its 12 songs. Produced by Tommy LiPuma and Krall, the non-original material ranges from the Mississippi-fueled jazzed-up blues of Mose Allison’s “Stop This World” to contemporary songs that are reinvented in Krall’s image by Tom Waits (”Temptation”), Joni Mitchell (”Black Crow”), Chris Smither (”Love Me Like a Man”), and her husband, Elvis Costello (”Almost Blue”). These covers are striking. Krall’s read of Allison’s tune rivals his and adds an entirely different shade of meaning, as does her swinging, jazzy, R&B-infused take on Smither’s sexy nugget via its first hitmaker, Bonnie Raitt. Her interpretation of Waits’ “Temptation” is far more sultry than Holly Cole’s because Krall understands this pop song to be a jazz tune rather than a jazzy pop song. “Black Crow” exists in its own space in the terrain of the album, because Krall understands that jazz is not mere articulation but interpretation. Likewise, her reverent version of Costello’s “Almost Blue” takes it out of its original countrypolitan setting and brings it back to the blues.

As wonderful as these songs are, however, they serve a utilitarian purpose; they act as bridges to the startling, emotionally charged poetics in the material Krall has composed with Costello. Totaling half the album, this material is full of grief, darkness, and a tentative re-emergence from the shadows. It begins in the noir-ish melancholy of the title track, kissed with bittersweet agony by Gershwin’s “Summertime.” The grain in Krall’s pained voice relates an edgy third-person tale that is harrowing in its lack of revelation and in the way it confounds the listener; it features John Clayton on bass and Jeff Hamilton on drums. In “I’ve Changed My Address,” Krall evokes the voices of ghosts such as Louis Armstrong and Anita O’Day in a sturdy hip vernacular that channels the early beat jazz of Waits and Allison. The lyric is solid and wonderfully evocative not only of time and place, but of emotional terrain. Krall’s solo in the tune is stunning. “Narrow Daylight,” graced by gospel overtones, is a tentative step into hope with its opening line: “Narrow daylight enters the room, winter is over, summer is near.” This glimmer of hope is short-lived, however, as “Abandoned Masquerade” reveals the shattered promise in the aftermath of dying love. “I’m Coming Through” and “Departure Bay,” which close the set, are both underscored by the grief experienced at the loss of Krall’s mother. They are far from sentimental, nor are they sophomoric, but through the eloquence of Krall’s wonderfully sophisticated melodic architecture and rhythmic parlance they express the experience of longing, of death, and of acceptance. The former features a beautiful solo by guitarist Anthony Wilson and the latter, in its starkness, offers memory as reflection and instruction. This is a bold new direction by an artist who expresses great willingness to get dirt on her hands and to offer its traces and smudges as part and parcel of her own part in extending the jazz tradition, through confessional language and a wonderfully inventive application that is caressed by, not saturated in, elegant pop.

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Diana Krall is the undisputed superstar of jazz-inflected singers in the last decade or so, and her new album on Verve, From This Moment On — mostly standards done with big-band arrangements — is a return to her usual form.

In 2004, she took a wobbly excursion into singer-songwriter territory under the influence of her singer-songwriter husband, Elvis Costello. The couple is expecting twins this November, which might slow her torrid creative pace just a hair.

Krall took the jazz world by the horns back in the mid-1990s, when her cool, understated approach to singing combined with her femme fatale looks and manner to make her the darling of audiences too young to remember names like Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald. She was, of her generation, the closest in spirit to those august figures, even if her initial strength was as a pianist, not a vocalist.

In that sense, she can be likened to Chet Baker, the hard-living trumpeter who became similarly popular in the ’50s with his whispery vocals and restrained sense of swing. Both are instrumentalists who added singing to their repertoire later. They make up for their modest technical gifts with a soft, breathy, sensual sound and persona. Even though she is an honest woman now, the photos of Krall on her Web site have her wearing heels in bed and looking sweetly seductive, a marketing ploy she is reportedly not enthusiastic about.

Her mesmeric presence is undeniable in person, but her approach to vocalizing in the studio strikes me as comparatively formal and tentative. She makes phrasing decisions on the fly as a proper improviser might, but she can’t see or hear two or four bars ahead, as a more architecturally-minded singer like Sarah Vaughan did.

The opening track, “It Could Happen to You,” finds Krall stretching out pronouns and participles as if they merited special musical attention — rather than making invention enhance expression, as instrumentalists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis did so eloquently.

In 1994, I witnessed a fledgling Ms. Krall recording a guest vocal on an album by alto saxophonist and arranger Benny Carter. At age 87, he easily had the most modern ears in the room, and took her to task for singing a phrase with a flatted fifth in it — a cliche in the jazz idiom for many decades. “Don’t go to that note,” he said to her tersely. “That ain’t hip anymore. Everybody plays that note.” Busted by an octogenarian for sticking too closely to the playbook — that must have been a shock!

While Krall might not be the most supple swinger the jazz world has ever known, she instead has a tendency to place her notes before the beat like Sinatra sometimes did — though certainly not with the same throwaway playfulness that made Frank’s approach to song sound effortless and casual, though deceptively so. By comparison, Diana Krall is guilty as charged: possession of an illegal quantity of premeditation and forethought while singing jazz.
by David Was

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