Looking at love with Diana Krall

I’d forgotten that Diana Krall plays the piano. It was only after several weeks of listening over and over to her The Look of Love that I remembered she does and that she did play in most of her previous albums. And she does again in every cut in this new one.

She’s good and she easily holds her own alongside the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by the great arranger and composer Claus Ogerman and an all-star line-up of musicians like Russell Malone on guitar, Paulinho Da Costa on percussion, Peter Erskine on drums and others. But somehow the piano playing is so smooth and unintrusive she makes you forget she is in charge. Besides, her singing and the songs she chose are so compelling, she makes you think of nothing else.

They are popular songs. They range from Gershwin to Bacharach. But they are the sort you seldom get even in the most wide-ranging collection of standards these days. If you want a Gershwin song you will most probably get Someone to Watch Over Me. For an example of a Bacharach hit, the first one that comes to mind is I Say a Little Prayer. What Krall has instead are S’ Wonderful and The Look of Love. And her approach to them is so original that she makes you feel you are listening to these songs for the first time.

Krall has turned every song in this album into a story. Her performance here has been compared to that of Barbara Stanwyck’s in the movies. For those who do not know Stanwyck, she was this Hollywood actress from the ’30s and ’40s who usually portrayed strong women who can also be vulnerable, either for the good, with a heart of gold or for the bad, a virago on the loose. I remember her best from marathon viewings on beta tapes of the epic mini-series The Thornbirds, where she played this rancher who took her all-consuming obsession with a young priest to beyond the grave.

Definitely consumed with love is how Diana Krall sounds in this album. In this regard, The Look of Love has been compared to Sinatra’s classic In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. The songs in these albums run the gamut of romantic emotions. They are the kind you go through during sleepless nights when old feelings get played and replayed together with the matching, and mostly unsettling, situations, while the appropriate song plays in the music score inside your mind. These albums invite you to wallow in self-pity. That is so unfair. But like Sinatra, Krall does it so beautifully, you can afford to be painfully in love again even if only for the hour it takes to listen to her songs.

S’Wonderful opens the album. Best of the lot is I Get Along Without You Very Well by Hoagy Carmichael, the guy who wrote Stardust. I remember Carly Simon singing a fantastic version in the Torch album. It was all bravado, so heartbreakingly false. Krall’s is an entire new perspective, so resigned and quiet. It is almost luminous. The other songs included are Love Letters, I Remember You, Cry Me a River, Besame Mucho, The Night We Called It a Day, Dancing in the Dark, The Look of Love, Maybe You’ll Be There and I Should Care.

Nostalgia collection

This is not quite in the same league but if you crave nostalgia, you might want to take a look at Colors from Another Time. Subtitled The Ultimate 60’s Collection, this is a two-volume set that retails for the price of just one and it has a whopping 40 songs by original artists. You will miss Elvis and the Beatles but this one has almost everything you ever loved listening to during the ’60s.

Think the Mamas and the Papas California Dreamin’, Simon and Garfunkel The Sound of Silence, Glen Campbell By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Skeeter Davis The End of the World, Francoise Hardy All Over the World and Blood Sweat and Tears Spinning Wheel, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Do You Believe in Magic, The Seekers A World of Our Own, down to Theme from a Summer Place by Percy Faith.

And if this compilation is all about the ’60s, you can bet there is one about the ’70s or the ’80s, maybe even the ’50s lurking somewhere.