OH
YES, SHE'S CHANGED HER ADDRESS
Diana Krall's The Girl In the
Other Room Casts
Jazz Diva As Singer/Songwriter
Verve
by Marshall Bowden
Read
the Jazzitude review of Diana Krall/Live In Paris
Read the Jazzitude review of Diana
Krall/The Look of Love
Read the Jazzitude review
of Diana Krall/Christmas Songs
Read the Jazzitude review of
Diana Krall/From This Moment On
It’s difficult to say which album, Elvis
Costello’s North or Diana Krall’s The
Girl In the Other Room is more unsettling to its respective
artist’s core group of fans. Even many who had followed
Costello long past his angry rocker phase and into a dizzying
array of stylistic experiments found North maddening,
from its spare arrangements to its very hushed, intimate
tone to the fact of its being titled after a song that doesn’t
even appear on the album, but can be downloaded over the
Internet. Costello had done this before (the leaving the
title song off the album, not the Internet part) when he
released Imperial Bedroom back in the ‘80s.
But North was definitely the work of a mature songwriter
reveling in his examination of the various styles and nuances
available to him.
Diana Krall is returning to the world of music
after the incredible success of her last studio album, The
Look of Love, a load of live dates, and a live
album, Live In Paris.
In the interim she and Mr. Costello have met, fallen in
love, and married. The inspiration for North was
very clear, especially when one downloaded and heard the
title track. And Costello seems to find himself inspired
anew. A recent tour stop found Costello and longtime pianist/keyboardist
Steve Naïve playing songs from North, romping
through a selection of Elvis’ nearly thirty years
of back catalog, and songs from a forthcoming album, which
he indicated (perhaps jokingly) would be called South,
with vigor and a renewed sense of adventure and purpose.
He was clearly reveling in his status as a songwriter by
turns both popular and serious, with little concern for
his place in the pop firmament. Now Krall continues this
trading of CD love letters with her new release The
Girl In the Other Room and seeks to be a singer and
pianist who has moved beyond the question of whether she
is a jazz performer or a more mainstream popular recording
artist.
The Girl In the Other Room’s
twelve tracks are evenly divided between songs written by
Krall and Costello together and a variety of covers (one
of those is also a Costello tune, the ballad “Almost
Blue” that has previously been done by Chet Baker).
Whereas Costello’s CD was widely touted as a move
in a more jazz-influenced direction (not entirely accurate),
Krall is coming from a jazz background, though Look
of Love traded her piano solos for lush string arrangements
that often sapped the performances of any chance of swinging
or becoming emotionally interesting. The new CD drops that
musical edifice, featuring Krall, actively playing piano
throughout, backed by guitar, bass and drums. Still, it
is doubtful that jazz purists who want Krall to recreate
albums like All For You or Love Scenes will
be won over by TGIOR. In addition, it’s hard
to say whether the gambit of hedging her bets by presenting
an album that is, essentially, easily divided into two separate
halves will satisfy any group of potential listeners. And
it’s clearly Krall who took the biggest risk here--though
her album ultimately seems less ambitious than Costello’s
it’s ambitious in light of Krall’s previous
catalog of recordings.
The opening number, a rendition of the Mose
Allison tune “Stop This World” is letter perfect,
maybe a little too clean and neat for comfort. Krall’s
piano solo immediately lets the listener know that she may
be singing and writing, but she has also come to play. Next
up is a Krall/Costello composition, “The Girl In the
Other Room.” This is the only tune on which Krall
and Costello are credited with both music and lyrics together.
On the other tunes the music is often by Krall with lyrics
by Costello or collaborative lyrics. Sometimes this leads
to melodies and chord progressions that seem slightly at
odds with the lyrical content of the song, but on the title
track the cadences of the song, both melodic and poetic,
sound like they could have come from nearly any Elvis Costello
album since Imperial Bedroom. In fact, one of the
covers on TGIOR, the laconic “Almost Blue,”
was composed by Costello and recorded on that album in addition
to being recorded in a live version by Costello and Chet
Baker. Krall adds nothing new to these versions, stretching
the melodic lines out a bit too much and interjecting only
sparse pianistic accents in direct contrast to Steve Naïve's
lush, rococo piano work on the original recording.
Krall also covers the Tom Waits song “Temptation”
from Frank’s Wild Years. The bluesy cocktail
bar sound that she gives the song may approximate the general
idea that Waits had in mind when he wrote the song, but
if one listens to his own version, one immediately perceives
musical tones that underline the darker side of the lyrics.
In addition, Waits’ vocal, far from portraying the
warm seductiveness of Krall’s voice, is a hoarse falsetto
that at times grates on the nerves like fingernails on a
chalkboard. If Waits meant “Temptation” to convey
the vibe of a smoky lounge with a sultry, sexy singer, it
definitely occupied a different neighborhood from the one
Krall is thinking of here. In similar fashion, Joni Mitchell’s
“Black Crow” from Hejira, clearly a
jazz-influenced song to begin with, is reduced to a less
edgy vision. The clipped texture of Mitchell’s rhythm
guitar and the crunchy, soaring lead work of Larry Carlton
are replaced by a bossa nova beat and the smooth, somewhat
flat guitar work of Anthony Wilson. When Krall sings the
lyric “I took a ferry to the highway/Then I drove
to a pontoon plane/I took a plane to a taxi/And a taxi to
a train” there’s none of the obsessive, haunted
traveler that Mitchell portrayed. Instead it sounds more
like a description of the jet set lifestyle that Krall herself
is no doubt leading these days.
So, what about the remaining collaborations
between Krall and Costello?
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