Review: Diana Krall by Beck

August 26th, 2009 03:41am

A few of the things I learned about Diana Krall in less than two hours:

- She has a microwave on her tour bus.
- Her kids are busy out in the lobby working the merch table.
- The hot-pink stilettos she strutted across the stage were a gift from some guy named Elvis. And no they’re not red.
- It happened to be Elvis’ birthday. To celebrate, he was scarfing clams casino at Carmine’s in Chicago.
- “Cheek to Cheek” was not really in her key.
- Learning music while growing up on Vancouver Island, she had fun at “band camp”.
- She’s actually shy (to prove it, she sang, “I’m shy!” after stumbling through an intro to a Tom Waits song).
- When she used to fly across the country with Rosemary Clooney, it was with a vodka tonic in one hand and rosary beads in the other.
- She likes to steal jokes from Sacha Baron Cohen (something about how she loved Buzz Aldrin in “Toy Story” and how Louis Armstrong walked on the moon - the segue being that Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart was in the audience).
- Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim once played a show at Carnegie Hall while the taxi meter was running.
- She’s going to therapy next week.

In other words, when she mentioned “I got silly when I had kids,” it was more than understood. There’s always been something a little goofy on the surface about Diana Krall - kind of like a blonde tomboy in heels, kind of like a pre-bombshell Scarlett Johansson in “Ghost World.”

But when she slips in those sultry vocals, it all melts away. After all the non sequiturs and strained asides, she’ll casually start a song, just tinkering at the keys, and suddenly Jobim’s “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” is recast as a dreamy love song (only to fall away like a veil in closing) or suddenly Waits’ “Jockey Full of Bourbon” moves with a sway instead of a grind and Nat King Cole’s “Frim-Fram Sauce” makes you actually want the french-fried potatoes along with the ausen fay and the chafafa.

It happened again and again Tuesday night at the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa.

Regardless of that taxi meter, Jobim got his due in hushed tones that breathed a little differently and read a little differently on paper: “Quiet Nights” and “The Boy From Ipanema.”

Her surrounding cast - Anthony Wilson on guitar, Robert Hurst on bass and Jeff Hamilton on drums - filled in all the blanks, especially with Hurst’s left-turn solo on “Cheek to Cheek” - a song that found Hamilton slowing the brushes down to the pace of a Zen garden rake.


By the time Krall summoned a bluesy Jelly Roll piano run through pieces of “(What’s So Funny Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” and Elvis’ new song “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” somewhere Nick Lowe was smiling and somewhere her husband was digesting clams casino and waiting for a happy birthday call (after all, as she mentioned, their iChat was down all day).

Did I mention the not-red hot-pink shoes?

Photos by Crista Jeremiason

Fuente: beck.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/...