Jazz star's new normal

Despite her 15 million albums sold, her international tours, her Grammy and Juno wins, her household-name celebrity and over-the-top glamorous CD covers, Diana Krall remains disarmingly normal. That's the impression that the Canadian jazz musician, who performs tonight at the sold-out National Arts Centre 2010 Gala, leaves after a 30-minute conversation.

The one qualification is that in Krall's case, "normal" refers to a "normal jazz player and music nut."
Like innumerable lesser known jazz musicians -- and many of her own fans -- Krall, after 15 years of stunning global success, is still blown away by music when it affirms the joy of togetherness, and even moved to tears by the mere presence of her own musical heroes.

Indeed, for all her achievements, she still expresses the same humble musical frustrations she likely had three decades ago. Then, she was a 16-year-old in Nanaimo, B.C., whose yearbook description noted that she wanted to be Oscar Peterson. What asked about what continues to drive her to make music, she instantly replied: "I'm so frustrated. I'm so frustrated. That's what it is. I want to be better. I want to be able to execute what's in my head, from my voice and my fingers, and I can't do it.

"There's something -- divine dissatisfaction -- in my own work that keeps me (going)," she says. "I don't get tired of the music." Chatting Thursday night from her Vancouver home, where she was about to prepare a salmon dinner for her three-year-old twin boys, Krall sounded warm, upbeat and self-effacing. By her own admission, she was also a bit rambling, which might have been due to jet lag. She had just returned from a three-week tour of South America.

"It's like I've been around the world in 80 days, quite frankly, just going so hard," she said. Last summer, in support of her 2009 CD Quiet Nights, she played a run of European jazz festivals. Earlier this year, she was in Australia and New Zealand. Her first concert in Canada after some months is "so important" to her, she said, at the same time recalling memories of other Ottawa appearances.

She singles out a 1997 performance with the NAC Orchestra in tribute to the Canadian composer and arranger Robert Farnon as a highlight of her career. She drops the name of Ottawa pianist Norbert Boyce, whom she called a "childhood friend" when they both lived in Nanaimo.

"He was one of the very first jazz piano players I ever met, and he was from Nanaimo. It was pretty groovy knowing that when I went to Ottawa, I would get a chance to play (for him)," Krall says.
She's grateful to Jacques Emond, the retired programming manager of the Ottawa International Jazz Festival, who presented her in 1990, three years before she released her first CD.

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