The most famous jazz singer in the world is in a bit of a state. She has recently arrived at Claridge’s from Paris but her luggage has not. When we’ve finished talking, Diana Krall needs to pop out and buy some bras. I look surprised; hasn’t she got flunkies for this sort of chore? This is clearly a question only an idiot man could ask. No, she hasn’t.
“Why?” she asks, faintly exasperated, “ Do you want to do it?”
Sadly, 25 years of intermittent music writing have not equipped me with the appropriate answer. Readers, I made my excuses and changed the subject. And in Krall’s hectic life there are a lot of subjects. It has been a tumultuous few years: in 2002 her mother died at 60 after a long battle with cancer just as the Canadian chanteuse was being crowned the glamour queen of jazz. Then she became the third Mrs Elvis Costello and recorded the introspective The Girl in the Other Room , reflecting the loss of her mother and the deaths of her friend, the singer Rosemary Clooney, and her musical mentor, the bassist Ray Brown. But this year she has returned to the standards that made her a multimillion-seller and has just completed a European tour that she declares her best yet. And, as the tabloids were swift to report, at 41 she is expecting her first baby in December.
“It’s been a time of intense loss and then intense joy. It was like the carpet had been swept from under you, you don’t know what to do, but then you meet this wonderful man who understands. I think you can get tired of being sad after a while. And now I’m having my own family, which is freaking me out.”
She talks in a gush of enthusiasm. “I’ve just been on an incredible tour, playing with John Clayton (bass) and Jeff Hamilton (drums), people whose records I practised to when I was a teenager. They make me play better and feel better and — oh, my God — I’m pregnant on top. One night we were swinging really hard and I was thinking, how’s this for the baby? And John Clayton says: ‘What are you gonna do? Swing him to death?’ “Then I’m thinking I should be going to yoga classes, but playing and singing every night is probably a really good thing because you are doing the breathing and expressing all these emotions.”
In person Krall is rather different from the jazz-babe draped sensually across album sleeves and in style mags. She wears a simple blue dress and is barefoot; her manner is self-deprecating, smart and funny. This may be because in the week we meet a Sunday supplement has published a piece in which the interviewer called her monosyllabic and a cow. But I think he got her badly wrong. The only time she frowns is when, casting around for a cheap laugh, I ask whether she has ever said of her husband: “Elvis has just left the building.” She assures me that her husband has seen this as a headline a hundred times and it really isn’t funny.
So we talk about music instead. For those who thought The Girl in the Other Room, which introduced Krall’s own songwriting, signalled a more contemporary direction, the soon-to-be-released From This Moment On finds her back in swing territory. So is it goodbye to Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits covers? “At the time of that record I wasn’t physically or emotionally able to sing anything that was like (she clicks her fingers three times) ‘Do I love youuu . . .’ It was a case of delving into another side of myself and exploring other things I’ve always listened to. Maybe I will go in that direction again. But then I started listening to Nat King Cole again, and other people from that era, and I wanted the challenge of playing in a quartet again, and the challenge of interpretation.”
Was she being nudged by the record company back into nostalgia-babe territory? She denies it. “The songs just felt right. It was the most relaxed recording I have ever done.” And yes, Krall with her sensual, smoky contralto takes control of Johnny Mercer’s Day In, Day Out and Come Dance with Me — made popular by Frank Sinatra — in a way that she never quite possessed Joni Mitchell’s Black Crow.
“I always get asked: ‘Why don’t you do more contemporary stuff?’ Well, it’s not like this (again she rhythmically clicks her fingers). I need to have that feel, to have something to improvise on.”
We talk about the jazz players who cover Radiohead or Björk. “It’s all just canvas to throw your paint on,” she concludes. She asks if I’ve heard any interesting new pop lately. “Elvis keeps up with all the new stuff. I’m not so good.”
Krall was a precocious child growing up in Nanaimo, British Columbia. She learnt to read before going to school and caught the jazz bug at the age of 4 listening to her piano teacher play boogie-woogie. At 15 she went round old people’s homes playing jazz piano. “I assumed that because they were old they’d love jazz. Actually, they didn’t.”
She listened to vaudeville, she listened to the Beatles, “and we loved Hancock”. What, Herbie? “No, Tony — The Blood Donor, The Radio Ham. For me and my sister at 16 ‘It’s not raining in Tokyo’ was a catchphrase. Pretty odd.”
When she began gigging in the United States, it was the hot-shot producer Tommy LiPuma who picked her out. “He saw me in this little flowery dress, a very plain girl playing at a jazz festival, and came in and said to me, ‘I think I hear something,’ and he nurtured me and taught me.”
While an exceptional pianist, she did not sing on stage until she was 28 or 29. “I hated it. I thought my voice sucked. It’s not until the last two years I’ve thought maybe I don’t suck as a singer.” She laughs. “Maybe the last three weeks.”
And suddenly a touch of celebrity insecurity peeps through — as if the invitations to the White House, the room service, the phone chats with Bill Clinton might fizzle out. She frets that her audience could forget her while she is off having her baby. “You have to trust that your career’s not going to go down the tubes because you take a couple of months off.”
Perhaps it is because success has been so hard-fought. In the late 1990s she still needed to borrow from her parents. “When I was 33 I was still scraping by, playing seven hours a night in a hotel lobby.”
Did she ever have doubts she’d make it? There is a long pause. “Not that I can recall. Frustrations, yes.”
Was she always ambitious? “More driven . . . driven to play music that I love well.”
I wonder whether, now that she is married to another musical star, there is a competitive element. Do they sneak a peak at the Billboard charts to see who’s up, who down? “No, no, not at all. I’ve been through all that.” A weary chuckle. “It’s the only way I’ve stayed single for so long.”
So how is married life? While home is nominally New York, being Mr and Mrs Costello is a long-distance affair. Both tour heavily and once they didn’t see each other for five weeks. “That was bad, but we phone each other every day and he’s loving what he’s doing and I’m loving what I’m doing. It’s hard but it’s the only way it can work.”
Still, after often touring for 300 days a year, she knows that it’s time to slow down, “even if I wasn’t having a baby”. I try to picture the scene of future domestic contentment. Would, I wonder, Mr and Mrs Costello ever sing together? There’s a pause and a chuckle. “Yeah, when we’re in our eighties on a cruise ship from Vancouver to Alaska we’ll be like: ‘All right Pump It Up everybody. Sing along. Come on. You know it.’ We’ll put it in a different beat. I’ll play a bossa nova.” She dissolves into laughter. “Not before then.”
From This Moment On is released by Verve on September 11
