The Voice Is Dark and the Emphasis Mysterious

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
A subdued Diana Krall held forth on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, where she gave the first of two concerts on consecutive nights with a 41-piece orchestra, augmented by a jazz trio (Jeff Hamilton on drums, Robert Hurst on bass, and Anthony Wilson on guitar). The music, much of it from her recent bossa-nova flavored album, “Quiet Nights” (Verve), maintained an aura of hushed introspection with occasional blips of swing, when her sturdy jazz pianism came to the fore.

When Ms. Krall paused to talk, her remarks — about traveling on a tour bus with her 2 ½-year-old twin sons; about meeting President Obama, who she said was unaware that her husband is Elvis Costello (he was impressed); about the similarity of New York’s recent rainy weather to the climate in her native Vancouver, British Columbia — were dry observations, offered in a low voice with barely a trace of a smile.

“Quiet Nights,” which closely follows the format of her enormously successful 2001 album, “The Look of Love,” has reversed the downward trajectory of Ms. Krall’s record sales. Both albums, arranged and orchestrated by Claus Ogerman, feature music that works equally well as ambient sound for the bedroom and restaurant and as foreground music of considerable psychological complexity.

Together Ms. Krall and Mr. Ogerman (who was absent; Alan Broadbent conducted the orchestra) treat songs as film-noir fragments in which everything remains ambiguous and unresolved. Ms. Krall doesn’t interpret lyrics in a literary manner. With her dark whispery alto, she slithers through songs in short stop-start phrases that sometimes reduce a melody to a single repeated note. One string of words may be elongated with an emphasis on a vowel or a scooped-up syllable; the next grouping may be nearly swallowed as she hurries to catch up.

The effect is to turn songs into mysterious stream-of-consciousness ruminations. Adopting a jazz singer’s prerogative, she turns standards (“Where or When,” “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” “Love Letters”) expressing familiar romantic sentiments into semi-abstract, personal reflections whose meanings may not necessarily coincide with — and may even contradict — the words as written.

At the same time Mr. Ogerman’s lush arrangements, with their cool, sighing choruses of woodwinds and strings, carry advanced chromaticism to the edge of dissonance. Instead of a harmonic happy ending, the typical arrangement fades out like a ghost in the fog. The combination of voice and orchestration sustains an undercurrent of erotic tension fraught with foreboding. The truth remains hidden. That aura of ambiguity applied even to those numbers, like “P.S. I Love You” and “A Case of You,” that Ms. Krall sang while accompanying herself on piano, without the orchestra.

The concert’s somber mood was interrupted by some moments of hard swing (“ ’Deed I Do” and “I Love Being Here With You,” the latter prefaced by an extended stride piano solo) in which Ms. Krall’s emphasis on vocal sound over verbal elucidation was even more pronounced. Yes, on one level, Ms. Krall is a middle-of-the-road pop-jazz diva. But just below the surface lies an interpreter who is talking to herself in a private language that is all about rhythm.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/arts/music/25krall.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss