Krall Makes Her Voice Loud, Clear

How far has Diana Krall come? The singer-pianist told a sellout crowd Friday inside Segerstrom Hall in the Orange County Performing Arts Center that 10 years ago she was playing an invisible lunch-hour gig in the same Costa Mesa hotel in which she was now staying.

Today, Krall is seen on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and, last summer, in a glamour spread in Vanity Fair. Her Grammy nomination for album of the year in a commercially oriented field that includes Santana, TLC and the Dixie Chicks is a stunning achievement, the first of its kind for a jazz album in decades. In another rarity for jazz recordings, the disc, “When I Look in Your Eyes,” spent time in the top 100 on Billboard’s Top Album chart.

As Krall’s career has skyrocketed, her craft has advanced as well. Compare Friday’s one-hour, 40-minute show to her 1998 appearances in the more intimate Founders Hall, and you see that the performer has found herself. Though still projecting a measure of shyness and vulnerability, the uneasiness has disappeared, replaced by an overall detachment that is simultaneously hip and mature. Suddenly, Krall is cool.

Krall’s Grammy-nominated recording features lush orchestral arrangements from Johnny Mandel. Here, she worked as she usually does with a trio. Despite the album’s attractions, the smaller setting is a better showplace for Krall, spotlighting her vocal nuances and astute piano playing. The foursome setting also showcased guitarist Peter Bernstein who made wonderful contributions throughout the evening.

Krall’s coolness lends itself well to ballads, and the singer was at her best expressing longing and melancholy in such songs as “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.” Slower numbers gave her the chance to spread out her phrasing and add the occasional throaty buzz to her tones, imparting a sense of pain. At infrequent times, she overdid these tonal variations, pinching her sound and losing some of her otherwise fine articulation. The contrast, as she returned to crystal clarity, could be striking.

Krall made an equally strong impression on the piano, playing with propulsive intent and direction. She revisited her stride roots during one solo spot and constantly quoted other songs, sometimes overtly as when she referenced “If I Only Had a Brain” from “The Wizard Of Oz” during “Let’s Fall in Love.” More often, these allusions were subtly placed as when she dropped a line of “Never Let Me Go” during a slow samba version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Krall’s melancholy reading of the classic Sinatra swinger stood as the evening’s most moving, and unusual, performance.

As an accompanist for her singing, Krall joins the company of Shirley Horn and others who have found just the right touch for their voices. Not as reserved as Horn, she still manages to find the poignant chord or leave the pregnant space to emphasize what she has sung. This talent did not carry over to her accompaniment of her sidemen. She often added too much clutter to the fine play of guitarist Bernstein.

While still performing such siren songs as Blossom Dearie’s “Peel Me a Grape,” a tune that garnered the evening’s biggest ovation, Krall has definitely found herself somewhere outside the sex-symbol status that she has cultivated. In a few short years, Krall has matured into a performer of grace, maturity and intelligence. Now, if she can only win that Grammy.