Diana Krall

A couple years ago, I bought a couple of Krall LPs to see what the fuss was about.

She felt like Lite Jazz to me. To measured. Too restrained. She left me cold. I sold the LPs.

For someone who blends jazz with gospel, r&b, blues, Broadway, soul, pop and Brill School, and does it with passion and originality, a style uniquely her own, see Laura Nyro. Especially New York Tendaberry, an LP with vocals (from a 20 decibel whisper to a 120 decibel scream) that will test the limits of your system’s performance.

She passed away decades ago from cancer, in her early 50s. There is one live performance recorded at The Bottom Line (sadly closed, I saw Miles Davis, among dozens of others there) in the late 80s that does not quite capture the magic of her live performance, but comes close.

Many of her compositions became pop hits for Three Dog Night, Barbara Streisand, the Association, Blood Sweat & Tears, etc. (Brill School incl Carol King, Janis Ian, Paul Simon, Niel Diamond, Geffen, Boyce & Hart, etc).

She was inducted into the rock ‘n roll hall of fame about a decade ago. Bette Midler did the introduction, burst into tears.

PS: I can’t edit my comment above anymore, one last thought: Laura made her first record for Verve when she was 16 years old. Clive Davis signed her to Columbia a year later. She was painfully shy, did the Davis audition with the lights off, the keyboard lit by a small candle.

She burst onto the scene in the mid 60s, and is considered the first female singer songwriter in the way we understand the term today. Without Laura Nyro, Diana Krall would not be the Diana Krall we know.

Rpeluso,
- Nyro’s dad was a jazz bass player
- to me, the connection to Krause is obvious and I’ve stated it already. The only thing that I might have left unsaid is that I think of Krauss as a jazz-tinged pop singer, like Nyro, not the other way around. She belongs with Bette Midler, not Billy Holiday or Maxine Sullivan.