The news that the luxe Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall has earned a Grammy nomination for best album of the year gives a shine to any number of things:
Jazz for finally letting itself out of its purist straitjacket; the Canada Arts Council for giving a grant 16 years ago to a kid from Nanaimo to study unusual music; the Grammys for veering away slightly from an image that gets cheesier each year, and Krall for rescuing us from dying of embarrassment in a week that saw Celine Dion publicly lose her mind in a Las Vegas chock full o' nuts wedding ceremony.
Krall's a smart woman, and not just because she would never attach chandeliers to her earlobes and exchange crowns with a man in a gown on a matching chaise longue, as Dion did. She excels in an art form so demanding that it has been accused of priding itself on shutting out potential fans. Krall sings in a way that relies on phrasing, not melody, as she plays piano. It's like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, she once gently explained to the readers of the Wall Street Journal.
Krall is 35, a beautiful woman with blond hair and the calm taciturn air on stage of an artist who is concentrating solely on her work rather than ingratiating herself with the audience. She plays with a bassist and a guitarist, sometimes with drums and on When I Look in Your Eyes, the nominated album, sometimes with strings. Jazz shouldn't have strings, the purists complain. But Charlie Parker and Chet Baker loved strings. She doesn't write her own music, they point out. Neither did Sinatra. She's isn't black. Neither was Peggy Lee.
Krall has been known to find the emphasis on her appearance a bit sinister. Reviewers fantasize, comparing her to any blonde whom comes to mind. She's Sharon Stone, Drew Barrymore, a young Lauren Bacall. "I've never seen anyone that skinny sing like that," she recalls one interviewer saying. Is the subtext that she is not fat or black, like a "real" jazz singer, such as Ella Fitzgerald? The Sunday Times of London's Culture magazine published an intelligent, adulatory feature on her work, and then leeringly headlined it "A great body of music."
The thing about jazz is that it either works or it doesn't.
When you hear Krall, you know instantly that you are hearing something remarkable, a velvety voice with an edge, silk with a cut, a piano that is perfect.
It's easy to explain why something is godawful, but it's very difficult to isolate what makes Krall so good.
Malcolm Gladwell, another Canadian and perhaps of one of the last remaining great writers left at The New Yorker, has suggested that brilliant people have the ability to map everything out, almost a physical tracing of what's about to happen. Wayne Gretzky, for instance, can imagine every combination of circumstances he is about to face on the ice. Perhaps this is the secret of Krall's phrasing.
Read these lyrics aloud: Peel me a grape, crush me some ice Skin me a peach, save the fuzz for my pillow Poach me a prawn, talk to me nice You gotta wine me and dine me. Send out for scotch, boil me a crab Cut me a rose, make my tea with the petals Just hang around, pick up the tab Never out think me, just mink me.
They're from Dave Frishberg's Peel Me a Grape, a 1962 hit for Blossom Dearie. They sound foolish, not to mention dated, when they're spoken and give no clue as to how they're supposed to be measured. Yet when Krall sings them, they suddenly make sense. And they're dripping with sex.
For all her beauty, Krall herself isn't a sex bomb like Michelle Pfeiffer playing the jazz singer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. The art direction of her third album, Love Scenes, had her all back-lit, gowned, breastful and honey-toned, but her current album, the look of which was produced by five women photographers and designers, is as attractive and straightforward as her Canadian self.
Krall is very close to her family, her mother Adella, a schoolteacher, her father Jim, an accountant, and her sister Michelle, who used to be a Mountie.
At the moment, Krall lives in a loft apartment in New York City -- she is about to move to Greenwich Village -- and gets home to see her family when she can fit it into her ferocious touring schedule.
In 1996, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, but has fully recovered after a bone-marrow transplant. Krall, who has said she is going out with Larry Klein, a Los Angeles musician who was once married to Joni Mitchell, has since held two benefit concerts to raise money for the transplant program.
The family was always musical, which may be one reason, says the man who discovered Krall, that they didn't really notice how talented she was. Bryan Stovell, a high-school music teacher in Nanaimo, saw the 15-year-old Krall in a junior-high jazz band performing on a local TV show.
Krall wasn't even singing in those days. But her piano solo electrified him.
"It just jumped out at anyone who heard it that this was someone who listened to Oscar Peterson and all the jazz greats. The whole jazz tradition was already there at age 15, the swing feel. Everything was in place.
"I immediately phoned the band director and said, 'Who was that?' " It turned out Stovell had gone to school with her parents.
"I said, not Jim and Adella's daughter! So I phoned up and Adella answered. I said, 'This is Bryan Stovell, I need to talk about your daughter.' She said, 'Oh. What's she done?' "
Stovell describes himself as "the basketball coach who'd just seen a seven-foot-tall kid who was co-ordinated." But even at that time, when it seems people were enthusing about Krall the way they do now, there wasn't anything of the "lonely genius" about her.
Sure, her parents had her listening to jazz, to Harry Lauder, George Formby, to everybody really. But she was still as much into such seventies staples as Supertramp, Peter Frampton and Elton John as anyone else.
(She ranges as widely as ever now, having spent New Year's on a eccentric millennium cruise to Antarctica performing with, of all people, The Chieftains and Art Garfunkel. She entertained the politicians at the notorious pepper-spray APEC summit, and on Love Scenes, she thanks Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his wife, Aline. In the grand tradition of liner notes, their last name is misspelled: Cretien.)
Krall was always well-dressed, Stovell recalls, just as her mother was, a precursor of the sensualist she is now, loving food, travel, "oils, body lotions and good towels, all those homey kinds of things," as she told Chatelaine.
Dylan notwithstanding, rock lyrics are simplicity itself, but jazz lyrics are notoriously tactile, partly because the jazz repertory came from decades where the pleasures of things were as celebrated as brand names are now. If you grow up listening to Gershwin lyrics about the way you wear your hat, maybe that makes an appreciator out of you.
After high school, Krall went on to study jazz in Boston. Her career path since then has been the classic one of any industry, where a young person wins the allegiance of the great and the good by means of merit. She impressed someone (jazz drummer Jeff Hamilton) who knew someone (bassist Ray Brown) who knew someone else (pianist Jimmy Rowles, with whom she got that study grant.)
With Canada and the U.S. becoming increasingly like Britain -- where singers, models, designers, journalists and even TV talking heads are getting the same jobs their mom and dad held -- Krall has never had any asset -- not family connections, not rich friends, not even nationality -- beyond her talent.
The readers of Downbeat, jazz music's house magazine, have just voted Krall best female vocalist of the year. When asked who won the previous year, managing editor Jason Koransky answers "Cassandra Wilson." Before that? Um, Cassandra Wilson, Cassandra Wilson, Cassandra Wilson Ca. . . "Oh, '93, it was Betty Carter." He sounds relieved. Any form needs constant injections of new talent, and this highlights what an exclusive paddock is jazz, with few genuine stars.
The poet Philip Larkin, whose other great interest in life, besides poetry and being cruel to his hairy, homely girlfriends, was instrumental jazz, loved the music in the 1930s when it was a "fugitive minority interest." He loathed modern jazz as he loathed any art form that prided itself on inaccessibility. His criterion was Eddie Condon's remark: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?"
Krall would be honey. Koransky admires her greatly: "Jazz is a very intelligent music. And that's actually a barrier. People think, to actually listen to and understand jazz, I have to know so much. Her music has intelligence, but people also like her accessibility. People are yearning for that real, classic jazz format. Everyone likes to swing. Her music swings and is very seductive at the same time."
It pleased -- but surprised -- him to see her nominated in a general category, as well as in best jazz vocal performance. The reason, he suggests, is that people are yearning for merit and integrity. "That's not to denigrate the vocal integrity of a Celine Dion or Mariah Carey, amazing voices. But when you listen to their albums, they are so produced. People want something that is a little more earthy, more genuine. When I Look in Your Eyes may be the best-engineered album that I've ever heard. But it's not overly packaged music."
It may be that the age of the belter is over. Its straight-to-orgasm lack of subtlety, its emotional blast, its onmipresence may have been right for its time, but what realms of nasality and lovesickness does it have left to explore? When Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk went into space, he took with him CDs by Krall and Quartetto Gelato, not Whitney Houston's full-chest drill, The Greatest Love of All.
Krall sings a lot of classic songs -- some suggest that the source of her appeal is the song more than the singer.
But that approach isn't new. Bryan Ferry, for instance, has always been obsessed by them. Linda Ronstadt followed Carly Simon's great Torch album and put out three albums with Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Riddle was her armature against criticism, but the problem was that Ronstadt, as she has always done, produced nothing more than icily perfect carbon copies of the work of great singers and songwriters.
Krall's versions are fully her own. Her I've Got You Under My Skin sounds nothing like Sinatra's, and why should it? She's a woman without Mafia ties and a stranger to the charms of Ava Gardner. He sings it as though the woman should be flattered; she sings it as a confession to herself.
So when all is said and done, why is Krall the musician of the moment? We are in a new century where music continues to change, as does the stance we seek for ourselves. The style of the moment is 'cool.' Jazz is cool -- it always has been -- so jazz coincides with the mainstream need for cool.
Krall is perfectly placed to give us exactly what we need right now.