© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Diana Krall's biggest problem in the jazz world is success.
Singing is closer to the actor's art than the musician's. The real trick of the ballad is not to make the song happen but to let it happen — to get out of its way.
Someone once wrote in the New Yorker that when Mel Torme sang A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, you heard the singer. When Frank Sinatra sang it you heard the song. When Nat Cole sang it, you heard the nightingale.”
- Gene Lees
The following piece by the eminent Jazz author Gene Lees comes after one on the subject of Diana Krall by Jazz scholar Alyn Shipton that posted to the blog earlier in the week.
My Krall Quest was inspired by a friend hipping me to guitarist Anthony Wilson’s solo that begins at 1:47 into the All Or Nothing At All video taken from the 2001 “Live in Paris” Concert which you’ll find at the conclusion of this piece and which is NOT ON the subsequently released CD. [Mercifully, it is included on the DVD.]
Anthony’s brilliant solo just knocked me out, which led me to a viewing of the entire concert and then to do a bit more research on Diana’s early years in Jazz by way of the Alyn Shipton essay and the below piece by Gene Lees.
Of course, since the Shipton and Lees interviews were conducted in 1999, Diana has gone on to become a huge star and I couldn’t be happier for her because as revealed in these earlier conversations she seems like quite a nice person in addition to being an exceptional musician and vocalist.
The Price of Making It
Jazzletter May, 1999
Gene Lees
“Few things illustrate the tensions in the career of Diana Krall as clearly as the letter from Eve Short and Alyn Shipton's article. Their polarity expresses the conditions of our time.
Alyn Shipton is a musician by training — a bassist — and the jazz critic of The Times of London as well as a broadcaster on jazz for the BBC. He is the author of Groovin' High, the biography of Dizzy Gillespie to which I made reference in the previous three issues. He is also a project editor for the British publisher Cassell, and he is my editor on the newest collection of Jazzletter essays, devoted to composers and arrangers, among them Gil Evans, Robert Farnon, Marion Evans, Mel Powell, Roger Kellaway, Gerry Mulligan, and Kenny Wheeler, due out in November.
Diana Krall's biggest problem in the jazz world is success. The first press run on her new album with charts by Johnny Mandel was, reportedly, a million copies. She can fill concert halls around the world, and no one in jazz or even quality popular music, to coin an awkward term, has had anything like the promotional and publicity buildup that she has. It is usually reserved for rock stars.
Her blonde image has been on the cover of seemingly every publication except The Watchtower. Her career has been advanced by such mentors as Ray Brown and John Clayton, and she has studied with outstanding teachers, including Mike Renzi, Alan Broadbent, and, most extensively, the late Jimmy Rowles.
You'd think most jazz fans and critics would be delighted. But she has been the subject of a fair amount of attack. That was to be expected, since many admirers of jazz really do not want it to be popular. It would deny them their claim to special taste. Someone fresh comes along, is acclaimed by press and the fan corps, becomes immensely popular, then suddenly is on the anathema list as having "sold out". It happened to Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley (accused or producing "homogenized funk"), George Shearing. It happened, to a degree, to Dizzy Gillespie. To some extent it even happened to Miles Davis.
It's happening now to Diana Krall. And this raises certain significant issues.
Mel Torme said once that "the trouble with this business is that it's all bottom and top. There's no middle." And whatever middle there ever was has been eroding, along with the middle class of America, as showbiz looks for the blockbuster movie hit, the overnight payoff, seventy-million-dollars the opening weekend.
I once said to Gerry Mulligan, "The trouble with people like you and me, Mulligan, is that we want world fame and total anonymity at the same time."
The truth behind that quip is that without a Name, the corporations are not interested in your work, no matter how meritorious. You are not "bankable," as they say in Hollywood. And nowadays, few are the executives who will invest the time and effort and grooming in a talent that new careers really require. RCA producer Joe Rene told me at least thirty years ago that whereas he had once been allowed five years to build the career of a new singer, now the accountants and lawyers invading and controlling the record industry wanted to see the payoff in one year. Singers like Terri Thornton and Ethel Ennis and Marge Dodson and Marilyn Maye, magnificent talents, got dropped. The business was no longer about music, it was about selling pieces of plastic.
The point of my comment to Mulligan is that you accept the necessity of publicity and the building of a Name, but the very process makes you want to run and hide from it.
Until a few months ago, I had never heard Diana Krall. Terry Teachout had been importuning me about her for two years, and friends among the musicians of Toronto had talked about her.
Then one day Johnny Mandel and I went to pay a visit to Red Norvo in a small hospital in Santa Monica. We both sensed, as we left his room after about an hour, that we would never see him again, and we never did.
When we reached the street, Johnny told me he intended to do an album with Diana Krall. He was astounded that I'd never heard her, and had me drive from one Santa Monica record shop to another until he found the album he wanted to be my introduction to her, All for You, subtitled "a dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio." I was charmed by it. I liked her piano work, and I liked her singing. We listened to it all the way back to his home in Malibu.
By coincidence, Jazz Times magazine asked me to write a profile on her. I was about to spend some time in New York, and thought I might interview her there. But she was doing a gig in Philadelphia at that time. I agreed to see her there.
Before I went, however, I read the thick sheaf of articles about her supplied to me by Rogers and Cowan, the public relations agency that is handling Krall. The redundancy of questions in the interviews was notable. Everyone subject to the pressures of a publicity campaign has been through it. Eventually the process becomes numbing. You begin to recite your answers to the predictable questions.
Mandel said that part of his enthusiasm lay in his delight in encountering a singer under fifty who knew the classic song repertoire. But realistically, she's not all that young. She's thirty-three, Ella Fitzgerald first recorded at seventeen, Frank Sinatra recorded All or Nothing at All with Harry James when he was twenty-four and by twenty-seven was the biggest singer the business had ever seen, Nat Cole was twenty-six when he recorded Straighten up and Fly Right, Gerry Mulligan wrote Disc Jockey Jump for Gene Krupa when he was twenty, Victor Feldman was an established professional at twelve, Woody Herman was twenty-two when he became leader of the Band that Plays the Blues, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker revolutionized jazz before they were thirty, Mendelssohn was seventeen when he launched the Bach revival and died at thirty-eight, while Bizet and Mozart died when they were only a couple of years older than Krall is now. Krall is, in fact, something of a late bloomer, and her work is still evolving.
The question frequently thrown at her — why isn't she writing songs? — is odd. Our best writers have not been singers, Johnny Mercer being the spectacular exception. Al Jolson would seem to be another exception, but in fact his name is on all sorts of songs to which contributed nothing whatsoever: it got there by coercion exerted on the songwriters in a process known in those days as the cut-in. Ella Fitzgerald never wrote a song in her life. Nor did Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Julius LaRosa, or Matt Monro. Frank Sinatra contributed a line or so to a couple of songs, but built his career on the classic repertoire. Frankie Laine wrote the superb lyric to Carl Fischer's We'll Be Together Again. Peggy Lee wrote a few quite excellent songs but nonetheless built her career on the work of others. A few of the good songwriters sing or sang well though not for a living, Alan Bergman, Alan J. Lerner, and Harold Arlen among them, but most sang badly if at all, and to hear some of them demonstrate their wares could be excruciating. Verdi, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Rossini, and Bizet didn't sing; or if they did, they didn't do it publicly. Years ago the two professions were considered mutually exclusive. Rock-and-roll changed that perception, and we have now had forty years of double-threat people who can't sing and can't write.
As for Krall's comment about operatic voice, it misses the point. Back when I was singing a lot in Canada, particularly on television, I did a CBC special that starred myself and the great contralto Maureen Forrester. I was reluctant to do it at all, figuring that with her pipes she'd blow me away. In fact she was enormously supportive, because she understood blending. I learned a lot of tricks from her in the downtime between camera shots, and she made a remark I do not forget: "I can sing opera and bounce a note off the back of a concert hall without a microphone, but I cannot sing Cole Porter without one." Maureen began as a band singer, and knew as few opera singers do the difference between the two kinds of voice production.
The late Jeri Southern once told me that each of us has two voices. I disputed this. Then she pointed out to me that Sarah Vaughan had a high, thin, intimidated speaking voice, almost that of a little girl, but a singing instrument of incredible power, darkness, and range. As for herself, Jeri said, she had been classically trained and she belted out a few phrases in an operatic voice sufficient to shatter goblets. She had become a success, she said, when she abandoned that voice and began singing in her speaking voice. It was a revelation to me, and I remembered that my early vocal influences had been Kenny Baker, Nelson Eddy, and John Charles Thomas; then I heard Sinatra. I once could produce a powerful operatic baritone; now I am not in touch with those muscles, and in any event, I don't like the sound. It is not appropriate to songs.
The most important thing operatic singing does have in common with "pop" singing is the breathing, the support.
It's unfortunate that Diana didn't, during her Los Angeles years, take some lessons from Jeri Southern, who taught a lot of people, including some established professionals.
Having read all the material, I went to Philadelphia. Beth Katz, the cordial and effective agent from Rogers and Cowan, had made a dinner reservation for Diana and me. I was there a little early. Diana came in, said hello, a little out of breath from hurrying, sat down, and began the conversation as if we knew each other, which in a sense, through mutual friends, we did. I took an immediate liking to her.
She was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Vancouver Island lies off the coast of British Columbia. Nanaimo (it's a Coast Indian name, pronounced Na-NY-mo) is a small city on the east coast of the island, facing toward the mainland. I went to high school for a year in Victoria, the capital of the province, a few miles south of it; Paul Horn lives in Victoria now. The island is one of the world's great beauty spots, mountainous and covered with Douglas firs, though how long they will last in the face of clear-cutting, the land's ongoing rape by the lumber companies, in both Canada and the United States, is questionable.
She mentioned Wigan, in Lancashire, England. I said immediately, "George Formby."
"How did you know?" she said.
"I not only grew up loving his movies and his records," I said, "but when I was a young reporter, I actually interviewed him." Formby was a Lancashire music-hall man and movie star, who played what he called a banjolele and sang comic songs. Peter Sellers was the ultimate Formby freak. But how did she, at her age, know Formby? Through her father, she said. Her father and mother loved that era of show business, and had recordings of the great radio shows, such as those of Jack Benny. It is not the influence of Jimmy Rowles that made her "look over her shoulder" at the older material. It was her family.
Her father is a chartered public accountant, her mother a teacher with a master's degree in educational administration. Her sister is bylaws officer of Nanaimo. When the two girls were young, they loved swimming and skiing. Diana had a dream of being an astronaut.
"I couldn't have had more supportive parents," Diana said. "The most important thing for me is my family. I'm close to my family. The hardest thing is living far away. I go home once a month."
"That often?" It's a few thousand miles from New York City, where she now lives, to Nanaimo.
"Yeah. I try to."
"And the singing?"
"I sang with my grandmother. I sound like her, a lot like her. My father's mother. She was a real character She was the last person to go to bed Christmas Eve. She'd still be up singing Hard-Hearted Hannah. Knew every tune. I went over to her house every day after school. We'd play the piano and sing. I just sang there, never at home. I didn't think I had a good enough voice. Then I started getting piano-bar gigs. I sang as little as I possibly could. Typical story. You get more gigs if you sing."
A considerable number of women singers began as pianists: Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Meredith d'Ambrosio, Audrey Morris, Jeri Southern, Shirley Horn among them.
She said, "I met Jeff Hamilton when I was nineteen, at the Bud Shank Port Townsend Music Camp. I listened to Rosemary Clooney when I was a kid, and he was on most of her records. And John Clayton, and Monty Alexander. Jeff encouraged me to come to Los Angeles and study, and said they'd make sure I was okay and got a good teacher.
"The next month, I think it was, the L.A. Four came up to Nanaimo. It was Jeff, and [guitarist] Ron Eschete, and Bud, and John. My mom and dad had them over for dinner. There was a jazz club in Nanaimo called Tio's. I heard Dave McKenna there, and Monty Alexander I met Ray Brown in Nanaimo, and since then they've all been very important to me.
"I got a Canada Arts Council grant and went to L. A. to study. I stayed four years. I studied with Alan Broadbent first. I'd like to study with him some more. And then I studied with Jimmy Rowles. Ray said, 'I don't think he teaches.' I talked to John Clayton, who said, 'Here's his phone number.' I called him up and went over to his house and I ended up spending most of my time at his house.'
"What were the lessons like?" I asked. "I can't imagine Jimmy giving formal lessons, saying ‘Do this, do that.'"
"I wish he were still here. I'd like to go over and ask more questions. He'd say, 'Sit down on the couch and talk and ask questions.' We'd talk. He'd tell stories about Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. I just did a tour with Ray. I'd sing about three tunes a night and play piano. It was just as important to me to hang out and listen to stories as it was to practice and play. With Jimmy and with Ray Brown. And still is. A lot of the time with Jimmy was spent just talking. Jimmy wrote out Poor Butterfly for me. It's one of my favorite recordings he's done. I'd come over and we'd talk and there was a piece of music there on the piano, and I knew it was waiting. And he'd say, 'Go take a look at that.' And it always had my name in the corner, Diana. And he'd have things written out for me."
"What was it like? Voicings and such?"
"Yeah. He'd play for me, and then I'd play for him. But most of the time was spent with me listening to him play. And we'd listen to records. We'd listen to Ben Webster, to Duke Ellington. He'd say, 'This was recorded 19-whatever' I admire those guys who know the history, Kenny Washington. The jazzmaniac! He is amazing. We're going to do some dates with him. One thing I couldn't do was play or record Jimmy's tunes. Two weeks before he died, I called him and told him, 'I can't play your tunes. They're so personal to your style that I would have to imitate you to play them.' I thought that way at the time. I don't feel that way now. I'd like to do a lot of his music. I thought, 'Why bother?' He recorded The Peacocks, Bill Evans recorded The Peacocks beautifully. I thought, 'What am I gonna do with that?' He'd swear and growl and say, 'Forget that! Play them!'
"There's a time to emulate, and then you have to do your own thing. There's so much to Jimmy Rowles. It's about attitude. I think the most important thing he ever taught me was about beauty. And I think I was too young even to grasp that. You want to play fast. That's all I wanted to do. He put on Daphnis and Chloe and we'd sit and listen to that. Ansermet's version. That was the recording I had to listen to. And he'd give me the scores. I learned a lot of stuff."
"I hear Rowles in your playing," I said. "But without the quirkiness. Jimmy would do eccentric things just for the fun of it."
"Oh, I do that too, sometimes," she said.
"What else did you listen to?"
"Art Tatum, which I found overwhelming at that age." She gasped aloud.
"I started singing in L.A. I did a lot of piano bar stuff, 'cause that's how I could survive. I moved back to Toronto after L.A. That was '87 to '90."
I said, "I noticed how many Canadians hit the Grammies this year."
"Canadian women," she said. "Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan."
"I'm sorry Shirley Eikhard's album got so little attention. It's a hell of an album. Blue Note just seemed to toss it out the window and did nothing with it."
"Well I'm really lucky," she said, "to have a record company that's been supportive. A record company that has not tossed me aside, but has allowed me to grow and change as an artist publicly, and given me support. I've had tremendous support from Tommy LiPuma and Al Schmidt." They are her producer and recording engineer respectively. "I've worked so hard to be a musician and play what I really want to play."
"Let's get back to this criticism that you don't write your own stuff. When I was growing up and listening to Frank Sinatra, he was doing stuff that was already old, like Night and Day"
"Oh yeahl" she said, with real surprise.
"Sure! Night and Day is from 1934. So was Try a Little Tenderness. A lot of it came out originally before I was born. All that stuff Sinatra did in the 1940s was at least ten years old and a lot of it twenty years old. Sinatra's whole career was largely built on older tunes. So is Tony Bennett's. Peggy Lee and Nat Cole too. All built on classic repertoire."
She said, "I've been misquoted on this point, including this criticism that I don't write my own material. There's this pressure in interviews: 'Do you consider yourself a jazz musician? Are you a jazz singer?' Because I'm not improvising and scat singing, does that make me a pop singer? But I play piano and I improvise in my trio and quartet. So it confuses people. I don't think about whether Shirley Horn is a jazz singer or not."
"No. And Sarah, with whom I worked, and who was my friend, hated the term 'jazz singer' and didn't want to be called one."
"Well, I don't want to be labelled. 'You don't fit, you're not a jazz singer like such and such.' Or 'You don't write your own tunes.' There's a lot to do. I'm writing my own arrangements, I'm playing piano, I'm leading my own band. I'm inspired by Ahmad Jamal and the way he took standards and did them his own way. I find that creatively fulfilling. Songwriters are songwriters. I think of Ahmad Jamal as a great jazz pianist, not as a songwriter."
I pointed out to her that most accomplished songwriters, and many jazz musicians, do not like scooby-dooing "jazz singers. "No one was ever as well equipped to do it as Nat Cole, and he didn't do it. On the contrary, in his singing, he was scrupulously faithful to the melody. The best scat singers have been instrumentalists — Clark Terry, Richard Boone, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Rosolino — and they would always do it in the abstract, not destroy songs by tortured melismatic meanderings.
Diana said, "Can you imagine someone saying to Nat Cole, 'Why don't you write your own songs?'"
"Well," I said, "he wrote a couple of light novelty songs, such as Straighten Up and Fly Right. No ballads that I know of. Donald Byrd once told me he'd concluded that the hardest thing to do was play straight melody and get some feeling into it. I've seen Nat Cole referred to as a cocktail pianist. Bill Evans too."
"There's that fine line. People will say, 'All you're doing is cocktail piano.' I don't listen to that. I don't obsess about it. Things that sound simple . . . it's not the easiest thing. Charlie Parker, Miles, Ahmad Jamal, they were playing standards."
"Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, all the great ones. And John Lewis argues that jazz was built in a kind of symbiotic relationship with popular music during its classic period."
"It's not something I feel I have to defend," she said. "I get that question, like, almost every interview. It's always, 'Why don't you write your own material?'"
Bil