Review of Diana Krall’s concert at the Convention Center

In the sold-out Prague Congress Center, Diana Krall sings about the last chance to dance before it gets bad and it’s time to pay the bill. It could be a song about war or the climate crisis, but in fact it is a classic: a so-called jazz standard, or a composition from the glorious era of Broadway musical theater. His name is Let’s Face the Music and Dance and he says that if we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, it’s best to enjoy it here and now.

The ninety-year-old composition by Irving Berlin unplanned foreshadowed the darkness of the Second World War, but it probably primarily reflected the hopelessness of the economic crisis at the time. The fact that she can not only deliver this song as if it were yesterday is one of Diana Krall’s greatest strengths. As well as the fact that in the hall for 2,700 people, the Canadian creates an atmosphere close to an intimate jazz club.

The two-time Grammy winner, who has sold over 22 million albums and will celebrate her 60th birthday next year, came to Prague for the seventh time this Saturday. She was here for the first time in the summer of 1997, when part of the proceeds from a concert at the Lucerna Music Bar was donated to the flood-affected Moravia. During later visits, she usually told the audience about her Czechoslovak grandfather Králov, or about the twins she had with the English singer Elvis Costello in her forties.

This year she kept her speech to a minimum. With the only exception, when she had a patch brought backstage for her Steinway grand piano. “My thumb is cut. If I make a mistake now, at least I can blame it on something,” she joked. Otherwise, she concentrated fully on the music.

Like guitarist Anthony Wilson, double bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Karriem Riggins, she had a lamp behind her and a curtain lit up in different colors surrounding them all, but that was the end of it. The roughly hundred-minute concert was no show like 11 years ago, when Diana Krall placed props like an old record player on the same stage and projected the filmed performance of actor Steve Buscemi as the ringleader on the back screen.

At that time, she was promoting the specially conceived album Glad Rag Doll. Today, as if the native of Nanaima, a town located on an island near Vancouver, was more like going back to the days when, as a seventeen-year-old student of Boston’s Berklee School of Music, she started playing in bars and restaurants. With a low-pitched alto voice of small range, she did not believe in singing at first. But those who sang at the same time got more opportunities, so I adapted, explaining the beginning of my artistic career in retrospect. This brought her first to a major publishing house and around the turn of the millennium to a commercial peak, when a pianist singing decades-old jazz hits as well as more modern pieces broke into the mainstream.

Since then, she has stepped forward several times to author work, especially on a record The Girl in the Other Room from 2004, for which she wrote half of the songs with her husband Elvis Costello. Neither with own compositions nor with covers of rock hits of the 70s of the last century on the record Wallflower but from 2015 it did not have such a commercial response. That is why in the end he always returns to jazz, even if he detours through Latin American music, which is close in genre.

This Saturday in Prague, she did not sing a single composition of her own for the first time. And surprisingly, she didn’t even include covers of Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan, two of whose songs she performed at the Brno Jazzfest the day before.

Instead, the people of Prague saw one classic after another: Let’s Fall in Love, ‘Deed I DoCheek to Cheek, East of the Sun and West of the Moon and more. Big romantic ballads alternated with faster swing compositions. Most of them come from the 1930s, they are associated with singers such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald or dancer Fred Astaire. And many of them appeared on the recording of Diana Krall’s concert from the Paris Olympia in 2001.

“Performing in Paris is one of the most popular periods in my life. My parents were also there, I sold the most records, you didn’t have to worry about streaming and Spotify,” she recalled after years to the period when the current guitarist Anthony Wilson began to accompany her.

What worked in her music then still works. Like her predecessors Nat King Cole or Sarah Vaughan, Diana Krall is first and foremost a jazz pianist. He has a natural rhythmic feeling, excellent command of the instrument, on which he accompanies himself and the musicians rather sparingly. During solos, he looks for his own way, avoids clichés and flashy tricks, does not aim for easy climaxes. Bebops runs through the scales to a minimum. Although he is the star of the evening, he provides more room for improvisation to his teammates, who use them on the surface for many minutes.

As a singer, she may sound restrained at first, but that’s her style: Diana Krall has always preferred to keep her alto voice in a lower, richer position. He often starts singing almost in a half-whisper and gradually increases the intensity. She does not work powerfully with vibrato, singing exhibitions are foreign to her. He doesn’t cheat, he doesn’t condescend, he doesn’t pretend.

Thanks to the phrasing, apparently cemented by the player’s bond with the instrument, it sounds relaxed, often intimate, sensual. The power of her voice comes from how naturally raspy it is, that it has a certain character and texture that imprints itself on every word. In addition, Diana Krall colors them with emotions in an exemplary way. Thanks to all this, it doesn’t matter at all that most of what he sings in Prague this time is almost a century old. The newest song in the repertoire, Devil May Carecomposed by jazz pianist Bob Dorough in 1956.

The composition ‘Deed I Do’, which Diana Krall already played on the recording of a concert from Paris in 2001, was also heard in Prague. Photo: Václav Vašků | Video: Verve Records

Those who know the repertoire will appreciate the little things: like in the song about love obsession Night and Day compared to the original, the first three stanzas, which tend to be deliberately intense, almost monotonous, seem to illustrate the unhealthy fixation on one person. Instead, Diana Krall starts the song in the middle, relaxed, moved to a light rhythm of Brazilian bossa nova. A beautiful example of how to work with jazz standards.

A coleporter encore will be set to a similar rhythm in the Congress Center I’ve Got You Under My Skin, originally a great romantic song that only started to swing in later interpretations. Although on Diana Krall’s 1999 record When I Look In Your Eyes, it was additionally colored by vibraphone, flute and strings.

The quartet delivers a standard high performance. Guitarist Anthony Wilson sticks to a nice, soft distortion a bit à la Jim Hall on his specially modified John Monteleone electric guitar. Double bassist Robert Hurst is given space for a virtuoso intro and a stompy type accompaniment walking bassdrummer Karriem Riggins applies the training he once acquired as an accompanist for double bassist Ray Brown, one of Diana Krall’s discoverers.

The whole thing is felt, seamless and pleasantly light. Quite adequate on a day that meteorologists will then mark as the warmest of the year so far.