- Where Or When [4:09}
- Too Marvelous For Words [4:03}
- I've Grown Accustomed To Your Face [4:46]
- The Boy From Ipanema [4:52]
- Walk On By [5:01]
- You're My Thrill [5:47]
- Este Seu Olhar [2:45]
- So Nice [3:50]
- Quiet Nights [4:45]
- Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry [5:47]
Bonus tracks:
- How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? [4:28]
- Every Time We Say Goodbye [4:49]
Diana Krall (vocals, piano); Anthony Wilson (guitar); John Clayton
(bass); Jeff Hamilton (drums); Paulinho Da Costa (percussion); orchestra
arranged and conducted by Claus Ogerman
Recorded: Capitol Studios Hollywood CA (no dates given)
This album surprised and disappointed me. In the past I have really
enjoyed Diana Krall's unique and intelligent take on the tracks she
records. She is gifted with a stylish minimalist piano technique added
to an instantly recognisable vocal timbre. All of which should guarantee
any album by her to be worthy of careful and considered attention.
But this is so very very dull. On every level I was by turns irritated,
bored and annoyed - it is such a waste of many talents. Clearly this
is pitched at being a very commercial disc. A visit to my local HMV
store proved the point - the product placement and price point chosen
for this CD aims for mass-market penetration. Not that Krall is the
first to pitch for this 'jazz-lite' middle of the road easy-listening
market. The problem is that other artists have produced far better
albums. Going back years I'm thinking of the marvellous collaboration
Nat King Cole Sings/George Shearing plays (Capitol
from 1961) - the piano and strings connection being an obvious stylistic
link - or more recently (but still more than twenty years back) the
three albums Linda Ronstadt recorded with the brilliant Nelson Riddle
- For Sentimental Reasons / Lush Life / What's new (Asylum
960 474-2 / 960 387-2 / 960260-2) - which were some of his very last
studio albums. Where both those artistic collaborations succeeded
was in taking standards and adding a musical treatment that was unexpected
yet hugely effective in throwing unexpected light on familiar material.
I'm thinking here of Riddle's take on Round Midnight from the
Sentimental Reasons album. He produced a poignant searching
arrangement that perfectly suits Ronstadt's country/pop vocal style
and results in a song that is an achingly beautiful musing on loss
and loneliness. Likewise, Shearing and Cole just ooze cool. Shearing
is the master of the apt half dozen note piano phrase - their famous
collaboration on the above album's Let there be love shows
how this idiom can be breathtakingly sophisticated and populist at
the same time.
Not that you would know this from the liner notes - because there
are none - Krall on the Verve website describes this album so; "It's
not coy. It's not 'peel me a grape, little girl' stuff. I feel this
album's very womanly - like you're lying next to your lover in bed
whispering this in their ear. It's a sensual, downright erotic record
and it's intended to be that way." In so much that this
is a very accurate description of the chosen vocal style - even more
breathy and intimate than normal I would have to agree. But I DO
find this to be unremittingly coy and affected - it's pillow talk
as music. Some might find this sensual and even erotic it just sends
me to sleep. I've not been able to sit through this album in its entirety
at one sitting yet. It is a beige watching-paint-dry kind of disc.
The sort of CD that is put on a player for an intimate soiree when
actually its sole function is to be aural wallpaper - dinner party
music not designed to be listened to. Another thing gleaned from the
website is the Brazilian influence on the disc, the majority of tracks
being given a bosa nova feel by 'veteran arranger' Claus Ogerman.
This is the bosa nova of a Hammond organ's rhythm pre-sets back in
the 1970's. The publicists on the website twitter excitedly about
the way the disc "draws much of its musical spirit from
the land that puts the 'carnal' into its annual Carnaval".
From my perspective she's put the valium back into CarniVAL instead!
So middle of the road you expect the disc to come with a free line
painting kit. While I'm having a good fulminate - why are tracks 11
and 12 termed 'bonus' tracks. Are there copies of the CD out there
which are missing them? To underline our great good fortune in having
them included the under-worked liner notes do not list them at all
and the CD cover grants them a plain type-face as opposed to the 60's
retro type that the 'main' tracks are granted. Coming back to the
arrangements for a moment - there is luxury scoring here a-plenty.
Twenty nine violinists are listed - although since two are down as
concertmasters I can't be sure that this number of players perform
on every track. Add to that twenty four further strings plus four
alto/bass flutes and four French horns and you can get an idea of
the plush rich textures opted for. Again the website relates that
the arrangements were recorded after the front-line elements had been
laid down. This in part explains why the orchestral lines do sit so
far behind the other instrumentalists. By definition they would not
be able to get in the way of the pre-existing material and neither
could the front-line parts feed off the backing tracks.
So to the chosen songs. All are standards and good ones at that worthy
of regular performance and indeed reinvention. But the key there is
the word reinvention - to my mind to go down such familiar musical
paths you have to have something new to say. Not once in one of these
songs did I stop and think, "now there's a thought". Krall's
pillow-talk style is the very essence of un-dramatic. So when she
chooses a show song to sing any possible hint of the theatrical or
story-telling is eliminated. Take I've Grown Accustomed to His[?]Face.
If you needed proof of the genius of Lerner and Loewe in a single
song this is it. The final song in My Fair Lady it is sung
by the emotionally crippled Henry Higgins who cannot admit even to
himself that he could actually love another person. The extraordinary
brilliance of this song is the encapsulation of this character's journey
from dismissal - he enters the scene swearing "damm, damm, damm"
- to final recognition of the fact that Eliza is now central to his
life and yet he has probably just lost her. It is one of the great
story-telling-through-song sequences in musical theatre. Here we get
a gender-changing four and three quarter minute smooch - but at least
it does not suffer from the bosa-nova-button treatment.
Apparently this version of The boy from Ipanema has been a
hit. I know that changing the gender of this lyric is far more common
and apologies if I am alone in this but again I find the gender-bending
in the song down right odd. It makes the lyric "when HE walks
its like a summer that swings so cool and sways so gentle" interesting
- clearly a boy wholly at ease with his feminine side. Perhaps soon
we will be treated to the uber-PC version The non-gender specific
person from Ipanema - I count the days although preferably without
the veteran arranger Ogerman's bosa-nova veneer. Walk On By is
the other track to be singled out on the cover yet to my ear this
is no different from the companion songs. A wash of mellow minor key
string chords over a gentle latin rhythm with all of the pain and
emotion of the original diluted and sluiced away. Quite what makes
the collaborators here quite so full of self congratulatory praise;
"And then we listened to those French horns playing the Burt
Bacharach melody? We all had a meltdown. There's a
lot of space with just the orchestra playing. It's reminiscent of
Ravel's Bolero" - eludes me.
I do not have a clue what they are talking about - clearly a cross-cultural
referencing that I am too ignorant to appreciate.
The engineering of the album is as proficient as one might expect
- personally I find the strings to be mixed too far back relative
to Krall and her band who are beautifully recorded but very upfront
on the sound stage. Why use an orchestra of some 60 players and then
mix them so far back they sound like 20? Likewise with the 4 alto/bass
flutes. This could provide a fantastic tonal colour. Despite listening
closely several times I cannot hear where they are used to play a
distinct chord sequence. It must be there but I managed to miss it
unless the very end of Ev'ry time we say goodbye counts where
the flutes fight against a suddenly upfront and rather unappealing
solo string section - the chords slump dispiritedly in an harmonic
meander that closes the album. Listening to the first of the bonus
tracks How can you mend a broken heart it bore in on me that
Krall's approach works far better in the absence of the orchestral
accompaniments. Perhaps the easy swing of the number suits better
too but certainly the feel of the song is less kitsch - that is until
the fateful moment at 2:15 when those enervating string sustains lumber
back into view.
So an album bound for almost certain financial success but one to
which I know I will never return. Diana Krall will make far better
and more challenging discs in the future perhaps sustained by the
sales of this disc and I will look forward to hearing them. By one
of those odd quirks of fate as this album finished my player jumped
unbidden onto Elana James' - of The Hotclub of Cowtown fame - solo
album which in its first twenty seconds crackles with all the energy
and verve the present album lacks.
Strictly for the besotted.
Nick Barnard
See additional review by Tony Augarde
CD Reviews
Verve 0602527049359
