Name Brand

It ain't easy wearin' green: Diana Krall. Photo Sam Taylor Wood.

Long before Avril and Alanis and Céline, single-name celebrity seemed the natural terrain of the great female jazz singers. From Bessie (Smith) to Billie (Holiday) to Carmen (McRae) to Ella (Fitzgerald), a first name was a keyhole to an entire aesthetic: a look, a style, a way with words, songs, rhythm. This wasn’t just shoptalk, either; it was, above all, a stamp of musical quality — and everyone knew it.

Diana Krall, I suspect, has always known this, too. As a student of jazz and jazz history, the Nanaimo, B.C. native knew it long before she joined Madonna and Mariah and Britney (and Avril and Alanis and Céline) in pop megastardom, where “Diana” — the brand, the trademark — had all the contemporary connotations of fame.

That’s one of the reasons her success has been a red-hot poker in the eye of the jazz police. Bessie and Billie, Carmen and Ella didn’t trade in brands. For one, they predated the shock-and-awe marketing campaigns of today’s record business. Furthermore, they seemed uninterested in using their names to sell anything other than their talent. Krall’s career trajectory, on the other hand, has been the swift, unambiguous ascent towards becoming a brand, from the diffident pianist-lounge singer to the sultry supernova wedded to plush, easy-listening scores.

On her last album, The Girl in the Other Room (2004), she covered Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and Chris Smither, in addition to writing some originals. (Girl has sold more than one million copies and has been on Billboard’s jazz chart for more than 80 weeks.) This was after she’d started selling Chryslers on TV, whetted the appetite of People magazine (with her marriage to Elvis Costello) and inched towards a level of renown once unimaginable in Canadian jazz circles.

Courtesy Verve Records.

Now comes Christmas Songs, a set of the most obvious, old-fashioned holiday tunes you could ever imagine: Jingle Bells, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, Let It Snow. With its faux-’50s feel and ravishing cover shot (the stare, the dress, the legs, the feet), Songs is built to move — into Christmas stockings, that is, and on the double. Released in the United States at the beginning of November, the album arrived at No. 23 on Billboard’s Top 200, No. 1 on the jazz chart. It’s already gone gold (500,000 units) down south and platinum (100,000 units) in Canada.

Could it get any more gooey? Unsubtle? Trite?

It could, actually, because here’s the rub: Christmas Songs is one of the most surprising reclamation projects I’ve heard in a long time. Just when you thought Krall had forgotten why she was Diana in the first place, she hits back, a quick body blow to her critics. She takes a top-flight Los Angeles big band (the Clayton/Hamilton Jazz Orchestra) and lets them roar. There’s nothing new here, but there’s nothing unvarnished, either. John Clayton’s arrangements — conservative but expertly executed — turn pure holiday mush into something husky and sharp and really quite swinging.

What’s fascinating about Christmas Songs is how immensely uncool it actually is. It’s a testimonial, really, to Krall’s single-minded devotion to jazz music’s very soft centre. This stuff would have been behind the times 40 years ago. Her vocal style — part Peggy Lee, part Nat “King” Cole, part Carmen McRae — can be cocky and expansive and cutesy, too. (“I’m just crazy about horses,” she adds, between brass shots at the end of Jingle Bells.) But it’s never something you couldn’t pipe into a Hudson’s Bay showroom.

Flipping fashion on its head, Christmas Songs seems like an attempt to recapture that original spirit of single-name jazz celebrity. Krall’s mission early in her career, to bring the genre to the mainstream, has actually come true. (Christmas Songs landed on the pop chart between Hilary Duff’s Most Wanted Collection and Kanye West’s Late Registration.) Her albums delight old fogeys of all ages, a formula that has become the record company motherlode since the rise of Harry Connick, Jr. in the late-’80s.

And if you admire the Great American Songbook, if you’re a Baby Boomer nostalgist, if you’re just a fan of songs well sung, what’s wrong with that? Snobs may see Krall’s discs as a kind of musical fossil fuel, but she knows better. Her choices mirror her style: cool, calculating and filled with a clear, upscale notion of good taste. The bravery isn’t in the art; it’s in her resolve to seek success in a realm that was long put out to pasture.

Anyone who heard Krall kick off the 20th anniversary of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival last June might have seen this coming. The glitz and glamour all came beforehand: two sold-out Orpheum Theatre shows, hype and scalpers lining the block. But when Krall finally arrived, she dressed simply (blue jeans, white toreador jacket), mounted a bare stage and took control of her quartet in a way very few Top-40 piano players can. She produced more idiomatic bebop than most had paid to see, sprinkling in allusions to Dizzy Gillespie and Tony Bennett and Harold Arlen. She seemed emboldened to show the almost-hometown audience just how much of the real thing she had in her.

In its own way, Christmas Songs says the same thing. “If you want to know what got me here,” it seems to announce, “listen up.” It’s still holiday music, mind you, but if Diana’s going to really be “Diana,” she might be headed back in the right direction.

Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer and editor.

Letters:

A very intelligent review. The writing was clear and clever and I wanted to read more. The author definitely has fresh insight into both the music and the artist. Thanks for the info 'cause I bought it for my friend for a gift and now can't wait to see if she returned the favour.

Leslie Bjur
Grande Prairie, Alberta