The racy side of a silky lady
THE Box, a tiny cabaret theatre in Manhattan's Lower East Side, is one of those semi-secret, glamorously decadent places that New York does so well.
Worn chaise longues, velvet curtains in need of repair and peeling wallpaper give an illicit, prohibition-era feel to a miniature burlesque palace with a reputation for the dark, the bizarre and the potentially unsanitary. Which makes it all the more surprising that Diana Krall, the fresh-faced, million-selling Canadian pianist and singer of classic jazz sophistication, is up there on The Box's stage, bashing the hell out of a piano on a jumping rockabilly tune called I'm a Little Mixed Up.
The choice of venue is significant. Krall recently finished work on Glad Rag Doll, a collection of songs she learned from her father's 78rpm record collection, and it marks the kind of dramatic shift established artists such as Krall rarely make for fear of alienating their audience. Where Krall's previous albums have been smooth and slinky, Glad Rag Doll is raw and emotional, with her piano sparring against the rough blues style of Marc Ribot, Tom Waits's guitarist of choice.
The cover shot, too, with her posing provocatively in the satin and suspenders of a Ziegfeld Follies girl, is a racy departure.
Tapping into the history of American music from the 1920s onwards, Glad Rag Doll is as torn and frayed as one of The Box's chaise longues, with radical reinterpretations of the songs turning them into anything but period pieces. Produced by Americana overlord T-Bone Burnett, an old friend of Krall's husband Elvis Costello, it's a risk that, creatively at least, has paid off. "Making this album was intense," says Krall, 46, the day after the show, looking exhausted but happy in a hotel suite a few streets from The Box. "Marc Ribot is an intense guy, and I'm attracted to intense people -- look who I'm married to -- but still, doing this album was as scary as last night's gig. It's been full-on."
If you are familiar with Krall in her day job as the classy interpreter of the Great American Songbook, Glad Rag Doll will come as a shock. These are intimate, obscure songs: the title track, for example, which was written for the 1928 movie of the same name, is about the kind of girl men want to love and leave. Recorded live and mostly using first takes, the album has a lack of preciousness that throws Krall into a whole new light.
"It's probably closer to the reality of who I am," says Krall. "My grandparents were coalminers with a piano in the front room, and this is music from tough times. But we've done it our way. When the band and I were still trying to figure out what the hell we were doing, Marc Ribot started playing this heavy, Howlin' Wolf-style blues guitar and I thought: wow. That's an interesting way to play a 20s jazz tune."
It's also a shock to see a musician as professional as Krall, who began her career playing piano in restaurants in Vancouver aged 15, let loose and work outside her comfort zone. About halfway through the show at The Box, she lost her way during a particularly tough bit of stride piano, shouted "shit", and pulled it back together again. It was one of the best moments of the night: virtuosity trumping imperfection.
"Yeah, I got myself into a little deep water," says Krall, amused at the memory. "Ribot was pushing me to play stride piano. He kept telling me to be fearless. But it was really hard. Put it this way: I wasn't thinking about the laundry, or whether I had left the iron on, when I played that. It took everything I had."
Glad Rag Doll's story begins two years ago. "I was starting to get in a rut. I didn't want to get to a certain age and just say: 'OK, this is what I'll do, and I'll do it very well from now on.' Then, one night after I had been to my dad's house for dinner, I was driving home when suddenly I felt that I had to turn back. I dug out all his old 78s, and one of them was Glad Rag Doll. And I thought the one guy who would know what to do with music from the 20s was T-Bone."
T-Bone Burnett has form as a reviver of historical American music. He's the man behind the glorious soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, as well as the country-tinged Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, which has been Plant's most successful album since Led Zeppelin. "I'd be calling T-Bone two days before and screaming: 'What are we doing?' " she says. "I've been working with (top jazz producer) Tommy LiPuma for 20 years, so to step outside that felt like it could be the biggest mistake of my life . . . thank God I got on with T-Bone and Marc Ribot. I called Elvis last night and told him I was worried about the gig, that I didn't know how it was going to go, and he said: 'Just remember how much fun you had making the album.' And it's true. It was a tough time because Elvis had just lost his father, and I was faced with all these questions, but it was a wonderful time."
That's the other challenge posed by Glad Rag Doll: Costello was also in the studio for much of the recording. Most of us find it difficult to work with our partners. at all. When said partner is one of the great British songsmiths, it takes the potential for major-level blowouts to a different level. "Elvis was only meant to come in and play a bit of ukulele. He ended up playing ukulele, mandolin and guitar, and doing backing singing. It was fine apart from one time when he kept looking at me like I was doing something wrong, but the key to playing this kind of music is to hear it a little differently, to approach it with your own feeling, and Elvis does that."
When she isn't reinventing her career, Krall has her life as a busy New York mum to think about. She and Costello have twin boys who have just started kindergarten near their home in the Village in Manhattan, which means that, a few hours after her showcase gig, she had to get up at 6.30am and take the kids to school. "A lot of mums wind down at around 8 and then go to bed at 10," she says. "On most nights I'm on stage, so my adrenalin peaks at around 11. Then you have to come down, and eventually you fall over. I'm basically tired all the time. And let me say, the kids are a new challenge.
"Right now I'm about to tour for six weeks and I'm struggling with it. But I never thought I'd have children until a friend said to me at dinner one night: 'Diane, you're going to be 40. Time to have children.' I realised that it's OK to be an artist and still have kids, and now Elvis and I enjoy being parents more than anything else."
Glad Rag Doll is one of those albums that is as modern as it is ancient. Some of the songs are almost a century old, but their themes -- love, loneliness, being treated badly -- could belong to Emily Blunt's next romantic comedy. Perhaps that's why Krall claims that making it was like being dosed with the elixir of youth.
THE TIMES
A stunner.