Diana Krall talks about her new album and , of course , Elvis .
( extract)
( The writer imagines Ms Krall`s new
album/ life is a house )
But you can’t stay in this melancholy place too long.
Move out to the hallway, and you’ll see a wedge of
light seeping through a crack in the door on the
right. Walk through, and you’re in a room on Vancouver
Island, where Krall is at the piano, feeling out a
tune. Elvis Costello is out on the balcony sculpting
lyrics that will become another song on the new
record, "Abandoned Masquerade." Krall’s left hand
twinkles with a large but tasteful diamond ring.
The two began dating before the Grammys last year,
then married in England in December. Observe them
together for a few minutes, and you’ll see two kids
besotted with each other, giggling over private jokes,
the world their playground. It is the only time,
except when she is onstage – safely behind the piano,
losing herself in the middle of an improvisation –
that Krall really lets go.
She laughs now about the fact that she wasn’t that
familiar with Costello’s music before they met.
"People would hate me for that: ‘Argggh! How could she
not know everything?’ But because of that, I got to
know him as a person."
Naturally, she’s come to respect her new husband’s
songwriting craftsmanship. "It’s pretty damn exciting
to be writing with Elvis Costello," she continues.
"I’ve learned a lot. I feel almost like a 16-year-old
going through a learning process because he’s pushed
me, and where I felt like I was going to give up – ‘I
can’t do it, it’s frustrating, I’m not good enough’ –
he’s like, ‘No, let’s just keep going. We’ll get it.’
It’s pretty wonderful to have that."
Next door is another room that houses Costello’s own
music. His latest album, North, resonates with his
discovery of Krall and Canada. "Give me the ice and
snow…/ Let me go north," he sings on the spartan title
track. She returns the sentiment on Girl, recording a
languorous and full-throated "Almost Blue," which
Costello originally wrote for Chet Baker. Krall’s
version, which embraces the song’s supple romantic
longing, begins with a quietly jaw-dropping
progression of complex harmonies she improvised after
soaking herself in Aaron Copland records.
THE SECRET LIFE OF DIANA KRALL
We thought we knew her. But on her intimate new record, our greatest jazz superstar lets us in on loving, grieving and coming home.
Text: SIMON HOUPT
Photos: MICHAEL GRAF
In the flickering candlelight of the Chambers Hotel bar in midtown Manhattan, Diana Krall is trying to relax. She takes a gulp of pinot noir, hunches forward to speak, then abruptly stops, blurting out an apology. "This is really hard for me because I just don’t sit down and analyze stuff like this. I just do not do it," she explains. "I can see my cheeks turning red."
At this very moment, the implications of what she has set in motion are beginning to dawn on Diana Krall, and she is terrified. She has always been a woman out of step with her time, whether as a child who preferred listening to jazz or as a performer who found hits in 50-year-old material. She is also fiercely private. For an exhibitionistic era in which we know more about some celebrities than we do about our own spouses, her defining recalcitrance is quaint, almost courtly.
But after more than a decade juicing up old torch songs and jazz standards that allowed her to stay at one emotional remove, last spring, for the first time, she began writing and recording music that mines the pain of her own life. The result will be released next month: The Girl in the Other Room, a forthright and sometimes melancholy album that reveals a Diana Krall we never knew existed. She is the girl in the other room.
In fact, at 39, her life is still carefully segregated into a geography of rooms. Some doors are locked, some slightly ajar; a few are hidden entirely unless you know just where to probe. Let Krall guide you, and don’t ask for more than she’s willing to give, unless you want all of the doors to suddenly slam shut in your face. But walk with sensitivity, and you’ll find some jewels.
You’re in a hallway that slips away to infinity. Step through the first door, on your left. There’s Krall, sitting by herself, her left hand cradling a book of black and white photographs. She looks up. "I haven’t talked about it because I was so protective of my family," she begins, "but I lost my mother on May 26, 2002." Her mom, aged 60, died after a protracted battle with multiple myeloma. A month later, Krall’s good friend Rosemary Clooney, another maternal figure, died of cancer. Four days after that, her mentor, the bassist Ray Brown, died in his sleep. Within another three months, she and her boyfriend of two years had split.
"What I carry with me is, you can’t always prevent what’s going to happen to you, but you can choose your response," she continues. "That was always my mother’s way of dealing with her disease."
Krall’s way of dealing with the tragedies was similarly defiant and clear-eyed. She sat down at the piano and began to play. The Girl in the Other Room trades in Krall’s signature elegant ballads and jaunty bossa novas for a handful of jazz-inflected pop songs about new-found love, the scars of grief and the comforts of returning home. On this record, Krall’s polished voice is now raw with emotion.
There are cover songs, more contemporary than the ones she’s used to: Tom Waits’ mangy "Temptation," rendered coquettish and playful; Joni Mitchell’s "Black Crow"; Mose Allison’s bluesy "Stop This World." But six of the dozen numbers are from her own hand. "I’m preparing for people to say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’" she admits. Her compositions heave like colliding glaciers, with the sorrow of real life wedged into a slow four-four beat; they jump up and grind like the best of her slinky jazz; they waft across the aural landscape like the crisp autumn scents blowing from Nanaimo across the Strait of Georgia.
But you can’t stay in this melancholy place too long. Move out to the hallway, and you’ll see a wedge of light seeping through a crack in the door on the right. Walk through, and you’re in a room on Vancouver Island, where Krall is at the piano, feeling out a tune. Elvis Costello is out on the balcony sculpting lyrics that will become another song on the new record, "Abandoned Masquerade." Krall’s left hand twinkles with a large but tasteful diamond ring.
The two began dating before the Grammys last year, then married in England in December. Observe them together for a few minutes, and you’ll see two kids besotted with each other, giggling over private jokes, the world their playground. It is the only time, except when she is onstage – safely behind the piano, losing herself in the middle of an improvisation – that Krall really lets go.
She laughs now about the fact that she wasn’t that familiar with Costello’s music before they met. "People would hate me for that: ‘Argggh! How could she not know everything?’ But because of that, I got to know him as a person."
Naturally, she’s come to respect her new husband’s songwriting craftsmanship. "It’s pretty damn exciting to be writing with Elvis Costello," she continues. "I’ve learned a lot. I feel almost like a 16-year-old going through a learning process because he’s pushed me, and where I felt like I was going to give up – ‘I can’t do it, it’s frustrating, I’m not good enough’ – he’s like, ‘No, let’s just keep going. We’ll get it.’ It’s pretty wonderful to have that."
Next door is another room that houses Costello’s own music. His latest album, North, resonates with his discovery of Krall and Canada. "Give me the ice and snow…/ Let me go north," he sings on the spartan title track. She returns the sentiment on Girl, recording a languorous and full-throated "Almost Blue," which Costello originally wrote for Chet Baker. Krall’s version, which embraces the song’s supple romantic longing, begins with a quietly jaw-dropping progression of complex harmonies she improvised after soaking herself in Aaron Copland records.
Go back out to the hallway, and try the big wooden door to your immediate right. Walk through, and you’re in a tavern down on University Place in Greenwich Village. When Krall came to New York in 1990, this was the jazz bar Bradley’s, where all the great musicians came to hear each other play into the wee hours of the night. The room, which opened in 1969, oozes history: It’s where Thelonious Monk played his last public gig.
Krall had talent and a nascent style when she came to town, but she was still exploring her persona, so she sat in Bradley’s and watched her predecessors for clues of how to act. While her teacher, Jimmy Rowles, or the hard bop trumpeter Freddie Hubbard charged through a set before shuffling to the bar for a drink (and then another and another), Krall absorbed the rhythm and atmosphere of the room. She’d sit at the bar blowing smoke rings, a femme fatale from central casting. (This was back in the day when you were still allowed to light up in New York.)
Bradley’s shows up on Girl in a number called "Changed My Address." Krall returned to the bar last year for the first time since it changed ownership in the late fall of 1996, hoping to show Costello a piece of her past. Now the place is a raucous sports bar called Reservoir. "There’s a pool table where the piano was and a television playing the sports news, but nothing else has changed," she recalls with a shiver. "You go in there, you’re like: Whoa! There’s all the ghosts of these great musicians that used to hang here."
There are other ghosts in Krall’s personal rooms too. Walk through the final door, and you’ll find Krall’s memories of growing up in Nanaimo, of setting out from there to conquer the world and of her longing to return home.
The Joni Mitchell cover song on the new album is no coincidence. It was Mitchell’s early experimental records like For the Roses, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira that inspired Krall to write as honestly and as personally as she does on Girl. "I started listening to Joan. She really writes about Canada," says Krall, quickly adding that she’d never compare herself
to Mitchell.
"I think it sort of hit me," she continues. "People say you should write what you know. This record is very much about Canada. There were things I wanted to leave home for – New York City, which was exotic and wonderful and where the jazz musicians were and where I wanted to be. But all of a sudden, I spent time at home, I lost my mother, I bought a home there on my own, and I started looking around…" She trails off.
Krall is describing the process of writing the song "Departure Bay," which concludes the album with wistful reminiscences of home. It is a pensive tribute to the spot where the Nanaimo ferry leaves for the mainland. Krall realized for the first time the uniqueness of the familiar sights she took for granted, "like arbutus trees and tugboats and driving over the Malahat, which is this place you get to, to go from Nanaimo to Victoria; it’s always hard to get over…"
She collects her emotions, then throws out more fragments: "Departure Bay is where I grew up and where my parents got engaged, where I threw my first stones as a child. It used to be a real drag because we used to have to take the ferry from there, and it was this pain in the ass. All of a sudden, coming back, these things – like taking seaplanes as a means of transportation – were a little bit more exotic to me."
"Departure Bay," the song Krall composed while Costello was working on the balcony, contains some of Krall’s most personal sentiments, directly addressing the death of her mother. Last November, Krall was awarded an honorary fine arts doctorate from the University of Victoria, "which I didn’t really feel like I deserved," she says. "I saw all these students walk past. I’m like: I’m sorry; I didn’t really earn this like you did." But she accepted the honour because the university was her mother’s alma mater. She played "Departure Bay," marking her first public performance of it on Vancouver Island. "I felt okay," she sighs. "I felt good. I’ll be all right, performing it."
No room is big enough to hold the emotions Krall associates with her Departure Bay, so that’s where this tour must end. The song’s final verse holds the promise of new beginnings because Krall now understands that the bay isn’t merely where people depart. It’s also where they arrive when they come home again:
Just get me there and one day we’ll stay
The long time off and far away
Now we’re skipping stones and exchanging rings
We’re scattering and diving in
Departure Bay. [ ]
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