After a day of raising twin six year old boys, Diana Krall likes nothing more than soaking in a bathtub filled with gin, she claimed during the first night of her Glad Rag Dolls tour, Friday night at the Beacon Theater. "A dirty martini," she dryly quipped. Those of us who waited 45 minutes to get thru security only to discover the set had already started might well have needed a dirty martini as well. As Helen Bach noted, why beef up security after the attack?
Diana Krall is a wonderful jazz musician for sure, and she can dip into the Great Tasteful Rock Book Of Standards with ease. She is both wry and warm on stage. But her recorded works have been on a downward spiral since 2004's deeply underrated The Girl In The Other Room. Both Quiet Nights and Glad Rag Doll were bores and When I Look Into your Eyes feels further and further in the distance.
The urge is to blame her husband Elvis Costello for this. He made her part of the first tier of rock star entertainers, suddenly Krall is the orchestra leader for McCartney's (lousy) Kisses On The Bottom and producing Barbra Streisand (also lousy) Love Is The Answer. Suddenly she is trying an exercise in sound balance she maintained so easily at the turn of the century.
This all came together with a first night jitters Krall and a disjointed set. With Marc Ribot overplaying his position as the centrifugal force of a five piece band, he is in the way and the band is solid but too much. Krall, who counts Fats Waller and Nat King Cole among her heroes, was born to lead a hot three piece jazz band. She is a wonderful pianist with the nimblest of fingers even when she trips over "Ain't Misbehavin'" She is perfect at smoky ballroom jazz with a standup bass and a drummer with a light touch. On Friday night, Krall was surrounded by three keyboards, playing one with one hand and the other piano with the othe hand. Virtuosi but over stuffed. Tom Wait's "Imagination" was excellent on record, but is so drawn out on stage you wish she'd stop, and this despite a sample from the great "Innocent When You Sleep" in the middle, is a tedious exercise. Near the start there is a brace of songs off the new album and none of them are good enough. I have never heard the woman as dreary and just plain underwhelming as "Just Like A Butterfly, Caught In The Rain". A late "Subterranean Homesick Blues" taken at a breakneck pace is a tongue twisting, silly piece of show off and it is too much. It doesn't sound right, like the wrong song is being played. A mid-set "Glad Rag Doll" with a picture of her Auntie, A Ziegfield follier, playing piano in her underwear from the 1920s, is touching without being actually very good.
But mid-set, the rest of the band leaves and Marc on guitar accompanies Diana on a couple of songs and then even he leaves and the set is at its best in the solo portion, a girl and her piano. Two terrific Fats Waller songs are followed by an A Capella funny "Father's Day" and a few lines from "Everyone Says I Love You" (written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby), the Marx Brothers song in "Horse Feathers". I swear, those couple of words, off hand, improvised, just speaking in melody, were the sets best moment. If not that, then a moment later, a perfect version of "A Man Needs A Maid", with her unfaltering unfettered contralto caressing "Heart Of Gold" in the middle. I was writing about musicians as being rock critics through their playing last week, this proves me right: Krall's version of the Harvest standard finds an answer to those who claim Young's desire for somebody to clean his room and go away is sexist. She claims, the point is loneliness, the point is "when will i see you again?". It is a wonderful version. I would vastly prefer to see a Krall solo set.
Her children prefer their Daddy's songs, Krall admits with a "makes sense", except for the last song of the evening, the song that she puts them to bed with, Jimmy Rodger's "Prairie Lullaby". It is a magical and close moment between we and her, just before Krall claimed "I've really enjoyed playing with you" instead of "for you". What a wonderful thing to say. What a superb concept.
The set didn't work, the band wasn't what I wanted to hear, and Krall, the coal miners daughter indeed, from the rural small towns of British Columbia, is all blonde and rock star, but I will forgive a lot from a musician who tells me she enjoyed playing with me and sends me home with a lullaby.
Grade: B+