Third Time’s a Charm for Krall

It has been, by almost any standard, an E-ticket ride for singer-pianist Diana Krall.

When her CD, “When I Look in Your Eyes,” was selected as a candidate for a best album Grammy Award, it was the first inclusion of a jazz album in the high-visibility category in more than a decade. And she’s been on a roller-coaster ride since the nominations were announced Jan. 4, maintaining a full-time performance schedule of one-nighters with media swarming for her attention at every stop.

That the possibility of an actual best album win was an extreme longshot was obvious, especially because Krall, who has had two prior nominations in the best jazz vocalist category, had never won a Grammy at all. But there was a certain poetic justice to the fact that, although she did indeed fail Wednesday to capture the best album Grammy--a category in which achievement can have less to do with musical quality than with the machinations of the record business--she did receive the award as best jazz vocalist, a far more direct acknowledgment of her artistic skills.

On Tuesday, the day before the awards, the stresses and strains of the pre-Grammy weeks were coming to a head. Yet at lunch in the Four Seasons Hotel, with a myriad schedule of hair, makeup and costume appointments, rehearsals and parties still looming, Krall, 35, was surprisingly relaxed.

“Hungry, actually,” she said. “I worked out this morning and I’m starved.”

OK. But what about that best album nomination? Any anticipatory butterflies?

“I know this is going to sound strange, but it doesn’t matter to me,” she says. “I mean, there’s no chance, not with Santana and the others. So I haven’t really thought about it very much. Album of the year. It actually hit me yesterday at a press conference. I’m standing with Stevie Wonder and Elton John thinking, ‘Wow.’

“It’s not that I don’t care, because I do. But I just don’t think in terms of winning and losing; I truthfully don’t. I mean, I’ve seen some of my peers at the Grammys, losing and going, ‘Oh, I’m so bummed, man.’ But I’m like, ‘Thank you.’ Because for me, I’ve already won, not just in the Grammys, but in my life, because I really have a great life.”

That may seem like an appropriate pre-programmed answer, but Krall, who does not count guile among her primary characteristics, is sincere. The straightforwardness of her attitude about the album of the year award is typical of the way she’s been viewing her accomplishments since her first album, “Stepping Out,” was released in 1993.

One of the high points of Krall’s Grammy week experience was the Monday night MusiCares tribute to Elton John.

“Can you imagine how it felt for me?” she asked. “I’d been practicing Elton John tunes since I was 15 years old. His music has always had an influence on me, and I had all of his records. And there I was singing one of his songs while he was sitting there listening. It was like a dream come true.”

A “dream come true” for a jazz artist to be singing a song by one of the great rock performers? There’s a remark that taps into the criticism that Krall’s nomination for album of the year has received from both sides of the genre divide: the pop world people who have described her as a “lounge singer,” and the jazz devotees who view her popularity as a manifestation of “jazz latte.”

But, Krall points out, she has always been an omnivorous consumer of different kinds of music, unfazed by genre distinctions.

“I’ve always had a Peter Frampton poster on my wall, listened to Queen and practiced the Bohemian Rhapsody on the piano,” she says. “As far as genres are concerned, I love to listen to Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline. And when I’m in my sister’s Camaro with the top down, it has to be rock ‘n’ roll. But I’ve never given that a second thought. That’s just who I am and where I’ve come from. And it doesn’t diminish my focus on jazz.”