Sweet Honey, Sly Soul

Diana Krall is learning what high visibility means. And the performer who is rapidly becoming the most spotlighted jazz singer in the country is not completely sure how she feels about it.

“Coming out here on the plane,” she says, “there was the guy who kept looking over at me. And I thought, ‘OK, just say something! Just ask me who I am and get it over with.’ ”

It’s not exactly the kind of attention that Krall is used to receiving. And it was typical of Krall, whose glamorous--even mysterious--onstage look fails to reveal her inner shyness, that it never occurred to her that the man might simply have been attempting to flirt with an attractive woman.

When that possibility is suggested, she waves it off with a typically offhanded shrug. Krall has a lot more than visibility to think about these days, with her career zooming into high gear and her schedule getting fuller by the minute.

“Now they’re giving me itineraries that look like real calendars,” she says with a laugh, “instead of those lists of stops I used to get.”

Seated at the bar in the Bel Age Hotel, relaxing with a Chardonnay, Krall looks surprisingly calm--not at all like someone whose schedule had her flying into New York from Japan last week, after standing-room-only performances at Tokyo’s Blue Note; turned up on ABC-TV’s “The View” for an appearance with her trio; flew to Los Angeles later that day for a New Yorker photo shoot with noted jazz photographer William Claxton; and was about to head down to San Diego for the Gavin convention, an important showcase arena to display her musical wares for radio programmers.

Actually, it’s been a busy few years for Krall, 32, who makes three major appearances in Southern California in the coming weeks--at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Friday and Saturday, and at UCLA’s Veterans Wadsworth Theater next Sunday. Just at the point where jazz singing seemed on the verge of fading into the background, she burst onto the scene with startling intensity. Reviving the style, selling records in bunches, the piano-playing singer has become--almost literally within the last two years or so--one of the most vital, most popular jazz artists of the ‘90s.

Her reviews have been generally adulatory. The Wall Street Journal described Krall’s voice as “wild honey with a spoonful of scotch.” The New York Times called her “one of the most quietly expressive jazz singers of her generation,” and Time noted that it is “difficult to believe that so much soulfulness and glamour can be in the same place at the same time.”

Krall’s fans have clearly agreed. Her three albums for GRP/Impulse!--”Only Trust Your Heart,” “All for You” and the current “Love Scenes”--have totaled sales in the hundreds of thousands, numbers usually associated with pop recordings. The latest two are currently fixed in Billboard’s Top 10 Traditional Jazz album chart, and “Love Scenes,” with nearly 250,000 copies released, is in the Top 20 of the Smooth Jazz album chart, as well.

“She’s just wonderful,” says lyricist Alan Bergman, whose “Soldier in the Rain” (written with his wife, Marilyn Bergman, and composer Henry Mancini) was sung by Krall on Dave Grusin’s “Two for the Road” album. “A wonderful player and a wonderful singer. And those things that make her a wonderful player--the instincts, the musicality--are the things that help her sing so well.”

They also are the things that attract musicians to Krall’s singing and playing--she has performed with such heavyweights as bassists Ray Brown and Christian McBride, pianist-composer Grusin and such emerging young stars as pianist Geoff Keezer and guitarist Mark Whitfield. And those qualities make it possible for her to work so effectively in live performance.

In September at the Monterey Jazz Festival, for example, Krall came on stage in the main arena before a noisy, distracted crowd, and elected to start with a ballad. By the time she was 16 bars into the tune, the audience was stilled, completely captivated by her voice.

She also brings a sly, whimsical, hip sensibility to her performances, using her strong, supportive but infinitely subtle piano playing to back jaunty, rhythmic phrasing. On a tune such as “Peel Me a Grape”--once owned by singer Blossom Dearie but now shared with Krall--she frequently sings the lines “Best way to cheer me, cashmere me . . . New Thunderbird me, you heard me,” then slips in an additional phrase, “A Range Rover’ll do, too.”

And her choice of repertoire, ranging from Nat King Cole rhythm tunes to the rich body of material from the golden age of songwriting in the ‘30s and ‘40s, seems perfectly positioned to connect to the cigar and cognac crowd’s growing interest in sophisticated songs.

But Krall’s arrival as a highly recognizable, best-selling jazz artist is the result not only of her own extraordinary talent but also of the assiduous work that her management office, Jazz Tree, has done to enhance her visibility.

She has made guest appearances on a string of albums by Whitfield, Grusin and Keezer, and an as-yet-to-be-released CD by harmonica player Toots Thielemans (on which she sings “La Vie En Rose” in French). She also performs on the soundtrack album for Clint Eastwood’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and a new compilation of music associated with the television show “Melrose Place.”

Jazz Tree head Mary Ann Topper declines to describe the Krall campaign as a specific marketing strategy, preferring instead to view the singer’s career from “the big-picture point of view.” But, in fact, in size and scope it is the kind of strategy common to pop artists yet rarely seen in jazz.

“Obviously, we’re looking for longevity rather than a flash in the pan with Diana,” says Topper. “And we’re looking at each engagement with that kind of goal in mind.”

Topper considers Krall’s guest appearances and her television bookings as possible opportunities for career expansion.

“You have to have a broad perspective in management,” she notes. “It’s very crucial to say, ‘Here’s this artist’s core. This is what has to be done, maybe for the next five years.’ And then, once that is set, whatever is done that is unrelated to that core can be used as other patterns to build on for the future.”

Topper is careful to note, however, that Krall is a unique project, that management strategies always have to take into account her insistence upon making the music come first.

“The most important thing at this point in Diana’s career,” says Topper, “is to make sure that her attitude is positive about everything that is happening for her.”

Krall, a bright, articulate, thoughtful woman, tries to view the entire process--the marketing of her music, the glamorizing of her image--from a realistic perspective.

“I know that if I’m doing ‘Good Morning, America,’ ” she says, “and they’re talking about doughnuts and chopsticks, I have to roll with that, because that’s an entertainment show. You can’t be defensive with, ‘Oh, I’m a serious artist.’ I am a serious artist, and that will come through in how I answer questions, so long as I’m presented with intelligent questions. But I understand that I’m not only doing publicity in jazz publications anymore.”

There is a slight edge of wistfulness to Krall’s comment. Her original goal was to be a jazz pianist, not a jazz vocalist, and she is still making the transition from the inner focus of a musician to the more outgoing demeanor of a singer.

“I have to work on this all the time,” she explains, “because I am so shy, and because I’m sometimes embarrassed or feel weird about having a bunch of people around me sort of looking at me. But shyness can be misinterpreted for aloofness, and that’s not really the way I am.”

In fact, for the past two years much of what has been seen as coolness, detachment and shyness can be traced to a focus unrelated to her performing.

“My mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma [a cancer of the bone marrow] two years ago,” Krall says, “which basically means you’ve got two months and goodbye. The only possible cure is a bone marrow transplant, if that doesn’t kill you. So we decided to take the chance. We didn’t know what would happen, but the bone marrow transplant [from the singer’s aunt] was done when my career was really taking off.

“So I was focusing all my energies on trying to get through the music, letting the music be my therapy, and spending as much time as I could with my family. I hated to be going off, traveling all over the world while all this was going on. But I felt I had to do it, because I felt that if I had stayed home, then my mom would have said, ‘Well, OK, that’s it then,’ and given up.”

Krall reports that her mother is now “doing really well,” that “the bone marrow transplant has taken, and she’s basically recovered.”

Despite her alluring image and intimate singing style, Krall’s background is pure girl-next-door. Born in British Columbia, she was raised in a home filled with music, while simultaneously competing on the swim and ski teams. Her only sibling, a younger sister named Michelle, also “has a great voice” but has not opted for a career in music, she says.

Constant exposure, in both her parents’ and her grandparents’ homes, to the music of Cole, Frank Sinatra, Fats Waller, opera and old radio shows may have had some impact on Krall’s eclectic tastes in music. But it also may be that she is simply an old soul.

“I used to go over to my grandparents every weekend and sing songs with them. And, no, it wasn’t one of those Norman Rockwell scenarios, it was just what we did, we never thought about it. I thought everybody’s grandparents were that way. But, of course, they weren’t.”

Krall was playing gigs by the time she was 15. Then, after studying briefly at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she moved to Los Angeles to study with pianist Jimmy Rowles, who was universally recognized as one of the finest jazz-based accompanists. He had worked with, among others, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. It was the start of a West Coast connection that established strong linkages with drummer Jeff Hamilton and bassists Ray Brown and John Clayton.

“At that time,” says Krall, “I used to think that I didn’t have the greatest instrument in the world, vocally. But when I listened to Jimmy singing, with that gravelly voice of his, I realized it wasn’t the instrument that mattered, it was what you did with it.”

What Krall “did with it” was to land a recording contract with GRP. Although she had made an earlier album for Justin Time, her real visibility began when she went into the studio with GRP label head and veteran producer Tommy LiPuma.

“I first heard her on that original album,” he recalls. “And, truthfully, it didn’t hit me. But somebody had a videotape, thank God, that she had done--with just her and her piano--of a BET cable show. And there was something that got through to me on that live performance. I thought, ‘Man, wait a minute, there’s something here that goes beyond just a singer-piano player.’ Then I saw her a few times in person, and that was it. The chill factor. She had it.”

The first GRP/Impulse! album, “Only Trust Your Heart,” did moderately well. It was the second release, “All for You,” that made the breakthrough. A tribute to Cole, it positioned Krall in a Cole-like trio format--accompanied by guitar and bass--singing songs associated with him that seemed tailored for her solidly swinging, intimate-sounding voice.

“The thing that makes it work,” says LiPuma, “is her great sense of time. She’s always in the pocket, rhythmically.”

Krall has just finished doing some songs for a new Ray Brown album and is looking forward to working on her next CD later this year--ecstatic over the fact that arrangements will be provided by legendary composer-orchestrator Johnny Mandel. Her next album will further underscore the impact she is beginning to have on the jazz vocal world.

“I think,” says Cathy Segal-Garcia, a Los Angeles-based singer whose rich-toned sound is not unlike Krall’s, “that Diana’s success will give some up-and-coming young singers the permission to be more comfortable with jazz, and with songs that people haven’t been doing. And that’s all to the good.”

But Krall’s busy schedule doesn’t allow a lot of time to think about the effect she’s having on her contemporaries.

“The longest I’ve been in my New York apartment, in longer than I can remember, is maybe a week,” she says. “But that’s part of this strange profession that I do. You have one week in which you feel really happy, and then you have a week in which you just feel like pulling the covers over your head.

“But everybody goes through their own deal, their own pain. And the important thing that we have to do as artists is to know that in addition to drawing upon our own pain, we have to be compassionate to others. I don’t necessarily have to experience songs that I sing to be compassionate and understanding in the way I express them.

“And that’s the dynamics, that’s the whole process. But I do enjoy those times in which I feel, ‘This is just the best.’ Because the music gives me this adrenaline rush, and that’s what you want to do with your audience, to give them, vicariously, a little piece of that.”

Krall takes another sip of wine, dipping into her pensive mode for several long beats before continuing, her conversational timing as subtly paced as her singing.

“Jeff Hamilton once told me, ‘Always remember you get to do this,’ ” she continues. “And when I was going through my most frustrating, most difficult times, I always remembered what he said--that this wasn’t something that was painful for me. This was getting to make music.”

* Diana Krall performs at Founders Hall in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, on Friday and Saturday, 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. Sold out. (714) 556-ARTS. Also next Sunday at Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration Grounds, Brentwood. 7 p.m. $25-$28. (310) 825-2101.