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Diana Krall in the Other Room

Verve Music Group

The depth of feeling which lies behind the beautiful
façade of Diana Krall's highly successful Verve
releases has always been known to her most
appreciative listeners. However, with her latest
album, The Girl In The Other Room, Krall not only
illustrates her understanding of the breadth of
possibilities in the jazz idiom but also reveals her
talent as a songwriter.

Indeed, the title song of the record is a Krall
original. While some may be attracted to the lyrical
portrait of a mysterious woman distracted by love (and
note in passing that the words were co-written with
Elvis Costello), the ear is drawn to the elegant and
effortlessly swinging accompaniment of Krall's piano
and that of her long-time partners in rhythm: Jeff
Hamilton on drums and bassist, John Clayton.

For much of the album, the musical support comes from
drummer Peter Erskine and bassist Christian McBride.
The inventive and sympathetic guitar playing of
Anthony Wilson is heard throughout a record that which
also features drummer Terri Lynne Carrington and Neil
Larson sitting in on Hammond B-3 for one cut.

The album is the first co-produced by Krall and her
long-time producer Tommy LiPuma. Recorded at Capitol
Studios, Hollywood and Avatar Recording, New York
City, the sessions were engineered throughout 2003 by
another long-term cohort, Al Schmitt.

Listeners used to Krall's intimate and seductive
interpretations of standard ballads may be surprised
at first by her present choice of composers. Take a
listen to her take on Mose Allison's timely blues,
"Stop This World" or the driving and joyfully carnal
"Love Me Like a Man" (with its final chorus salute to
Count Basie) and you will hear a singer, bandleader
and piano player in her top form.

Krall's sensual approach to Tom Waits' "Temptation,"
with its extraordinary introduction by Christian
McBride, is balanced by Krall's own exquisite preface
to a most tender rendition of Elvis Costello's "Almost
Blue." A beautifully reflective version of a
relatively obscure standard, "I'm Pulling Through,"
recalls the style of her teacher, Jimmy Rowles.

The spirit of Rowles and an apprenticeship of the jazz
club experiences is inspiration for one of Krall’s new
compositions, "I've Changed My Address," only as Krall
reflects, revisiting some of these venues can be a
shock: "Everything looks pretty much the same but the
place is now a sports bar and there is pool table
where there used to be a piano."

While so much of the music is new, the album itself
recalls a vinyl disc of two sides. The bold and
flowing solos from Krall and guitarist Anthony Wilson
on Joni Mitchell's song of travel, "Black Crow,"
announce a series of original songs that speak of
family and of love, but also of enduring the grievous
loss of a parent. As Krall explained recently: "I went
through a series of deep personal losses and changes.
So...this is what I did instead of shutting the door
and saying ‘I can't deal with it’".

So it is that the gospel changes of the hopeful
"Narrow Daylight" give away to the sophisticated blues
of "Abandoned Masquerade." It is this song that most
clearly expresses the need (for now at least) for the
singer to step out from behind the beautiful romantic
illusions found in so many songs of the past. Once
again, the music leaves the listener in no doubt that
they are hearing the work of a jazz composer.

The gently defiant tone of "I'm Coming Through" marks
another subtle shift of musical scene with wonderful
playing from Anthony Wilson. The content of these last
songs is undoubtedly the most specifically personal
material yet recorded by Diana Krall.

The album closes with perhaps the most deeply felt of
the self-composed titles. "Departure Bay" contains
vivid and touching images of her hometown of Nanaimo
on Vancouver Island but also a wrenching description
of her family's first Christmas without her mother and
a final verse that welcomes new love and hope for the
future.

Musically composed by Krall alone, these songs mark a
lyrical collaboration with her new husband, Elvis
Costello. Explaining how they worked, Krall said: "I
wrote the music and then Elvis and I talked about what
we wanted to say. I told him stories and wrote pages
and pages of reminiscences, descriptions and images,
and he put them into tighter lyrical form. For
"Departure Bay," I wrote down a list of things that I
love about home, things I realized were different,
even exotic, now that I've been away".

Songs often suggest and recall moments in our own
lives and listeners must surely be aware that Diana
Krall's previous recordings contained many personal
but private meanings for the artist. On The Girl In
The Other Room, what was once partly hidden has been
brought beautifully into view.

BORN IN NANAIMO, BRITISH COLUMBIA (NOT FAR from
Vancouver), Diana Krall grew up in the western part of
Canada and began studying the piano when she was four
years old. By the time she was 15, she was playing
jazz in a local restaurant/bar. One person who
encouraged her interest in music was her father, a
stride pianist with a vast knowledge of such Twenties
and Thirties keyboard masters as Fats Waller, James P.
Johnson, and Earl Hines. "I think Dad had every
recording Fats Waller ever made," she says, "and I
tried to learn as many as I could."

Krall was still a teenager when she was awarded a
scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of
Music in Boston. After two years in Boston, she moved
to Los Angeles, where she met her first jazz
heavyweights, including John Clayton, pianist/singer
Jimmy Rowles, and Ray Brown, the legendary bassist who
served as her musical mentor (and played on Only Trust
Your Heart). Krall had lived in Los Angeles for three
years when she moved to Toronto, and it was a Canadian
label that gave her a chance to record for the first
time. In 1993, the Montreal-based Justin Time Records
released her debut album, Stepping Out. In 1994, she
signed with GRP and recorded Only Trust Your Heart,
which featured Brown on bass and Stanley Turrentine on
tenor saxophone and marked the beginning of her
association with Tommy LiPuma (who has worked with
everyone from Barbra Streisand to George Benson).

Since then, LiPuma has produced all of Krall's
subsequent albums for GRP, Impulse!, and Verve,
including All for You: A Dedication to the Nat "King"
Cole Trio (1995), Love Scenes (1997), When I Look In
Your Eyes (1998), The Look of Love (2001), and Live in
Paris (2003). "That was the first time I had produced
that many albums in a row for any artist," he says.
"Diana and I have such a good chemistry between us --
it makes it easy. When one of us makes a suggestion,
the other listens in earnest. We have tremendous
respect for one another."

Krall grew increasingly popular throughout the
Nineties. Only Trust Your Heart, All for You, and Love
Scenes all sold well, but the album that put her over
the top commercially was When I Look in Your Eyes. In
addition to spending 52 weeks in the #1 position on
Billboard's jazz chart, When I Look in Your Eyes won
GRAMMY®’s in two categories, Best Jazz Vocal
Performance and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical,
and received a GRAMMY® nomination in the Album of the
Year category-putting Krall in competition with
Santana, the Backstreet Boys, the Dixie Chicks, and
TLC.

Needless to say, it isn't every day that an
acoustic-oriented jazz improviser finds herself
competing with major rock, country, urban, and
teen-pop stars for a GRAMMY® award. Nor is it every
day that a jazz improviser becomes a major attraction
at the Lilith Fair festival, founded by
singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan to spotlight female
pop-rock and pop artists. But in 1998, Krall had no
problem winning over a young, predominantly female
audience more likely to be into Sheryl Crow or Alanis
Morissette than Abbey Lincoln or Chris Connor.

When I Look in Your Eyes eventually went platinum in
the United States (where it sold over one million
units), double platinum in Canada, platinum in
Portugal, and gold in France. It was a hard act to
follow, but Krall's next album, The Look of Love,
would also be an impressive seller. Released in
September 2001, it entered the Billboard 200 at #9 and
sold 95,000 copies in the U.S. alone in its first
week.

"The thing about Diana is her musicianship," Al
Schmitt said in an interview with the Los Angeles
Times. "More than most singers, she knows what's right
for her, and she knows how to make it happen
musically."