jueves, 28 de febrero de 2013

Article: Feb. 22-23: Diana Krall thinks dinner party when she performs Glad Rag Doll music (www.ottawacitizen.com)

By Ben Kaplan, Postmedia News February 20, 2013



Diana Krall says she really relaxes on stage: ‘I let everything go and have a ball.’
Photograph by: Bryan Schlosser , Regina Leader-Post




Diana Krall, shown at a Valentine’s concert in Regina, says the new show she’s touring across the country brings a touch of vaudeville theatre. She also loves to feel like she’s playing a gin joint.
Photograph by: Bryan Schlosser, Regina Leader-Post



*****

Diana Krall

When & where: Feb. 23-24, National Arts Centre

Tickets: Start at $85. At the NAC box office or, with surcharges, through Ticketmaster

Diana Krall has won two Grammys, eight Junos and sold upwards of six million albums. The 48-year-old, born in Nanaimo, B.C., has performed at the White House and recorded with Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand and Ray Charles. On the eve of launching her Glad Rag Doll North American tour, which brings her to Ottawa Feb. 23-24, Krall places us in her shoes, and explains what it feels like for her to be onstage.

Like a dinner party

I know from the first few bars how the night will go. It’s like a dinner party. You know how sometimes you throw seven people at a table and they can’t find common ground and other times people sit down immediately and it’s like they’ve known each other for a million years? That’s how it feels when it’s good.

All I do is I go onstage and feel out the vibe. After I suit up in my hockey gear, adjust my skates just so and I watch the opening film from the side of the stage and I watch the band’s accompaniment until it’s my time to go out and sit at the piano. I make sure my shoes are on the right feet and then away we go ...

Love that gin joint feeling

The new show is vaudeville theatre. I’ve played a lot of vaudeville theatres in my day, a lot of gin joints, and I love that feeling. I like the idea that the band is in a film, like some distant memory of the silver screen. I like the idea that the concert begins and it’s like putting needle to wax — the music doesn’t need the visuals, the music’s strong enough on its own, but this is something I’ve been cooking up my whole life. The overture begins with Steve Buscemi playing the vaudeville barker and he says, “It’s a little darker than love being here with you.” It’s not a nostalgia project; the new show is mixing avant-garde with The Band.

That’s right, The Band. Is that surprising? The Band have been the biggest influence my whole life. The Band, Bob Dylan and Neil Young. I don’t play bass, drums and guitar; we do standards and obscure songs from the ‘20s, but they’re an influence on me. Essentially, they taught me to play whatever I feel.

Expect audience participation

I play to enjoy myself. I’ll talk to people if they talk to me. I even have a section where I’m on the piano and singing and it’s like, “What do you want to hear?” Sometimes, people scream out obscure songs. Once, somebody asked for Elvis Presley, and I did it. I’m an old piano bar player, so I’m used to it. My show is definitely an audience participation experience — it’s pretty fun.

The stage is like a living room

On tour, we travel 18 hours on buses and run around cities — literally, jogging around from appointment to appointment; there’s no time to even go to the hotel — but then when you get onstage, it’s the best part of the day. I get onstage and relax. That’s why I do what I do, that’s the easiest part: I let everything go and have a ball.

Onstage, I feel like I’m not separated from the audience; the audience has to feel like I’m in their living room. That’s why I love Jann Arden: What you see is what you get. I’m closer to that than playing a character, the imagination of the diva. Early on, I got pressure about what I had to be and struggled with that: “Put your gown on and be a diva,” has never worked for me. I’d love to be Jann Arden.

Find your own story in the songs

The job is: You want the audience to feel as good as you do. I want everyone with me, not away from me. My job is to make everybody feel something — feel good or feel a groove, feel a ballad and sadness or else feel elation. I’m the one to take them to that place. It’s not them watching you tell them about your emotional journey, you’re trying to help them find theirs. You’ll never hear me say, “This is about me when I was going through this breakup, blah, blah, blah, this is about my bastard boyfriend.” I don’t do that. These songs are for you. Find your own story. Listen to Neil Young at Massey Hall. He’s the best at this. He might say, “I wrote this song in Vancouver.” He doesn’t tell too much or too little — he leads you to your own thoughts.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen





VID: DIANA KRALL IN MONTREAL




Diana Krall
"There Ain't No Sweet Man
That's Worth the Salt of My Tears"

de Fred Fisher

Glad Rag Doll

Diana Krall - piano et voix
Stewart Duncan - violon,guitare
Aram Bajakian - guitare
Patrick Warren - claviers
Dennis Crouch - basse
Karriem Riggins - batterie

Série Jazz à l'année 2012-2013
Jazz All Year Round Series 2012-2013

Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier - Place des Arts, Montréal, Qc (Ca)
27.02.2013

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martes, 19 de febrero de 2013

Diana Krall nominated for a 2013 JUNO Award! - (www.dianakrall.com)




Announced today, Diana Krall receieves a 2013 JUNO Award nomination in the category of: Vocal Jazz Album of The Year. Hosted by Michael Bublé, the 2013 JUNO Awards will be held at The Brandt Centre on April 21, 2013.

Diana Krall was born in British Columbia. She was raised in Nanaimo, a small community on Vancouver Island, where she began performing professionally at age 15 as a jazz pianist. In 1981, Diana won a Vancouver Jazz Festival scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston and, after a year and a half of serious study, she returned to British Columbia. Renowned bassist Ray Brown heard her playing one night in Nanaimo and convinced Diana to move to Los Angeles where she obtained a Canadian Arts Council grant to study with Jimmy Rowles. Jimmy encouraged Diana to explore her vocals to supplement her already blossoming piano skills. With several successful CDs to her credit, Diana has won numerous awards including a JUNO Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album (2000) and a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance (2000). She received the Order of British Columbia in 2000 for being a good-will ambassador for British Columbia and epitomizing Canadian culture. The greatest talent in the jazz field to come along in a generation, she frequently acknowledges her roots in Nanaimo where she began.

For additional information please visit: junoawards.ca



viernes, 15 de febrero de 2013

Krall delights, entertains and enthralls...(www.dianakrall.com)


CALGARY — There are some who would say the idea of love is an outdated one.

It, our traditional, Shakespearean definition of it, is something that has long passed relevance, long stopped making any sense in the world that we now live.

It’s a concept that’s, well, quaintly antiquated.

If that’s the case — and, in this Kardashianed society, the argument is one you really don’t want to have — then there couldn’t have been a more fitting and wonderful way to ring in the consumer-tainted, Hallmark-hollow holiday meant to celebrate the dead idea than Canadian jazz ingenue Diana Krall’s delightful St. Valentine’s Eve show at the Jubilee.

It kicked the concept to the curb while celebrating it all the same, mocked while it wooed, pantsed while it seduced, and used the business end of the arrow to put that cherubic fraud Cupid in his candy-packing place.

It was a perfect evening of anti-love, for anti-lovers with songs of rain, sadness, heartbreak, betrayal and the flawed, facade of amour, and it was all-together worth hearing.


The stage was, quite literally set, as the Jube faithful walked into the room, which mirrored the themes of Krall’s excellent current release Glad Rag Doll, greeted by a crescent moon and red curtains, and the silver screen behind showing old-timey cartoon’s such as Betty Boop, with old-timey depictions of life in the age of once was.

As the house lights dimmed, the feature began, with a short film of Steve Buscemi, bringing Krall and her magnificent five-piece into the room, to perform stirring and dreamy opener When the Curtain Comes Down.

Cinematic. Splendid.

And the rest of the evening was equal to the tone, eclipsing it often, with more moody, motion picture projections, memorable musical moments and, more importantly, the star of the show herself, who shone brighter than ever.

Krall has, over the year’s, become jaw-droppingly natural, sometimes silly, incredibly present, in-the-moment, and flat-out endearing. She’s no longer aloof, as she was in her early days, or deserving the diva tag that was earned mid-career, nor even the unattainable, lingerie-clad model adorning the cover of her latest album. She’s merely a generous entertainer, a first-class performer who gives all of herself and so much more.

From her rambling, often goofy stream-of-consciousness song introductions and stories about
summering in the Pincher Creek area at her uncle’s pig farm to a shoutout to students from local Lord Beaverbrook High School with whom she collaborated on with the children’s book From Blue to Red and a mid-set call for requests as she sat, solo at an upright piano, Krall was a lovable heroine every heterosexual man wanted to be with, every woman wanted to be (some, presumably, also with).

But to say that her persona outshone the actual music would be mischaracterizing the show, which was as much action as it was non-rom-com. It’s hard to remember a better paced, more engaging evening of song that’s hit the city than the two-hour-plus, no-intermission, no-opener-needed concert.


It wasn’t sleepy or maudlin, pink-hued, AC jazz to spoon and snooze to. It was everything but.

Krall and Co. showed they could flat-out rock as they did with: a gnarly version of Tom Waits’ Temptation; an angry, bloody, bruised and heartbrokenly epic version of Lonely Avenue; a skronky-tonk take on I’m A Little Mixed Up; a brilliant encore jam on The Band’s Ophelia; and an amazing cover of the classic Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears, that climaxed with her giggling, “This ain’t your daddy’s music.”

When they went jazz, the swung hot ’n’ hard and/or suitably soft, including the fiddle-led Just You, Just Me that bounded about the room as playfully as Pan, and a simmering, bohemian version of Tony Bennett’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams

And, stripped of that skilful band — which, seriously, it’s hard to praise enough — the energy didn’t even remotely flag, as Krall, her smokey yet pure pipes, those fabulous not flashy fingers, made magic out of Peel Me A Grape, Fly Me to the Moon and Fats Waller’s ragtimey I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.

Old timey. Outdated. Antiquated. Sure.

But on this St. Valentine’s Eve, Diana Krall was charming, enchanting and endearing.

And it was impossible not to fall head-over-heels in love.

Read more: www.calgaryherald.com

*****

Diana Krall performs We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye during her St. Valentine’s Eve show on Wednesday at the Jubilee.
Photograph by: Ted Rhodes, Calgary Herald

sábado, 9 de febrero de 2013

DIANA KRALL TOUR 2013 - VANCOUVER, B.C.; FEBRUARY 5, 2013

Diana Krall: Nanaimo native gets nostalgic, strikes up band for some ’20s, ’30s revelry
By Francois Marchand, Postmedia News February 5, 2013






VANCOUVER, B.C.; FEBRUARY 5, 2013
Diana Krall in concert at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, B.C., on February 5, 2013.
Photograph by: Steve Bosch , PNG


Read more: http://www.canada.com/entertainment/Diana+Krall+Nanaimo+native+gets+nostalgic+strikes+band+some+revelry/7923724/story.html#ixzz2KMpbOiB5

Eleven studio albums into a career spanning close to two decades, Diana Krall is mutating.

At her sold-out homecoming show in Vancouver, where the Nanaimo-bred superstar jazz singer spends a good chunk of her time with hubby Elvis Costello and their twin sons, Krall was in a nostalgic mood Tuesday night.

The Costello/Krall clan has been especially infatuated with the music of the ’20s and ’30s of late.

First it was Elvis who delved into the early 20th-century American songbook with his National Ransom album a couple of years back, and last fall it was 48-year-old Diana who took a turn re-exploring her father’s old 78 r.p.m. platters on her ragtime era-inspired Glad Rag Doll.

In both cases, producer T-Bone Burnett was at the helm, and you can tell the connection between the two recordings and the live performances that followed are closely intertwined.

For Krall, it meant a stage draped in red with golden clam shell-shaped lights at the front, film backdrops including old animated cartoons, footage of ’20s dancers, sequences from Georges Melies and Fritz Lang films, and an intro featuring actor Steve Buscemi singing When The Curtain Comes Down.

The Buscemi bit, not quite a nod to TV show Boardwalk Empire but close enough, was an awkward way to start, part of the song featuring pre-recorded vocals, which had the crowd confused as to when to start clapping to welcome the singer.

Krall would finally appear to thunderous applause, taking her place behind the piano for We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye.

There would be another odd visual choice, namely showing footage from ’60s puppet show Thunderbirds during Annette Hanshaw’s Ev’rything’s Made For Love, which Krall dedicated to her kids.

Krall would spend more time than usual explaining the origins of some songs, something that obviously made her nervous at first.

She even acknowledged it herself.

“They say I never talk enough and now it’s overkill — ‘Shut up and play already,’” she said. “My husband usually does all the talking. He says hello, by the way. That’s all he says.”

She laughed. And all of a sudden, she relaxed and found her groove.

If her understated, breathy contralto and soft piano stylings have attracted legions of fans and landed her Juno and Grammy glory (she single-handedly brought jazz back to the top categories at both awards ceremonies a decade ago), Tuesday night’s performance was much more band-oriented.

There was Tom Waits’ Temptation, in which Krall led her expert five-piece band into a circus-like jam heavy on the guitar.

Later it would be a stormy and electrifying version of Ray Charles’ Lonely Avenue (written in the ’30s by Doc Pomus) that would wow the audience.

There was no reason anyone should have expected Krall to show up on stage clad in the provocative bordello-inspired nightwear she sports on the cover of Glad Rag Doll (she was wearing a classic black dress/suit), but that bawdy, gritty spirit was certainly there at times.

Still, Krall’s comfort zone vocally remains classic lounge jazz, and fans got a taste of the singer’s traditional style when she took a solo turn at the upright piano for a few songs including a superb Ziegfeld follies-inspired Glad Rag Doll.

“Justin Bieber!?” she exclaimed when a fan in the front row requested a tune from the teen idol.

“I could if I wanted to!” she answered with a defiant grin.

Instead she handed out a rollicking version of Fred E. Ahlert’s I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter, which she covered with Paul McCartney on his standards album Kisses On The Bottom.

Longtime fans may have found some of Krall’s new live elements startling, but the one thing you can never argue with is Krall’s impeccable choice of material, which may be the biggest reason why everyone keeps coming back.

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News


Fuente: www.canada.com

*****