I am not a big Diana Krall fan-- I own only one of her CDs, which I don't listen to very often-- but live jazz is a lot scarcer now that I have moved from New York City to Orange County, California, so when some friends said they were going to see Diana Krall at the Pacific Ampitheatre, I decided to go along.
She opened with "I Love being Here with You," taken very fast. She seemed to be rushing through the lyric to get to the instrumental solos. Her trio was quite good-- Anthony Wilson on guitar, Paul Keller on bass, and Jeff Hamilton on drums-- and her own piano solos were excellent, far more interesting than her singing, to my ears.
The next tune ("All or Nothing at All") started much slower, but again Diana's vocals seemed flat and uninvolved. This remained the pattern for most of the set-- she has a nice voice, but rarely seemed to be very emotionally involved with the lyrics. "Let's Face the Music and Dance," and Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue," suffered especially from her surface readings. One exception was Mose Allison's "Everybody's Crying Mercy," one of the few songs on which she really seemed to care about the lyrics.
While her singing failed to thrill me, I was pleasantly surprised by her playing, which showed much more fire than her too-cool singing, and by that of the trio. Most tunes featured plenty of solo space for everyone, and Keller's bass solos were an especial highlight.
Krall sang a number of songs by contemporary pop singers (the Elvis Costello song mentioned above; "Love Me Like a Man," which she introduced as "a song by Bonnie Raitt," though I don't think Raitt actually wrote it; and a few others.) There is no reason she has to limit herself to the classic American Songbook, of course, but she did most of these newer songs with little or no instrumental soloing ("Love Me Like a Man" was the exception, the vehicle for her only blues playing of the set). The pop songs suffered for that reason-- she doesn't have the emotional impact of a good rock singer, and didn't give these tunes the benefit of the jazz solos she and her trio played on the older tunes.
All in all, a good, but not great, night of jazz. But on a warm summer night under the stars in California, I wasn't complaining.
Linear Mode
