Surrounded by her accompanying trio, Diana Krall did her best to turn the Albert Hall into a facsimile of a jazz club. Spotlights picked her out amid the surrounding darkness as she lounged at her piano, and a mysterious haze shimmered up from the stage where the cigarette smoke should have been. "Nice to see you," she murmured, her voice sandpapered to a husky croak by a persistent cold. "This is a pretty incredible place."
Although perhaps not acoustically. Many of the combo's nuances were sucked into the hall's echoing dome, never to return. Guitarist Anthony Wilson, a Woody Allen-like figure who plucked studiously at his instrument all evening, received especially short shrift from this Bermuda Triangle effect, though his fine touch and supple phrasing suddenly emerged with startling clarity when he picked up an acoustic guitar for an encore of the Gershwin standard, 'S Wonderful.
Krall herself is a bundle of mixed metaphors. Sometimes she is wistful and lovelorn, as in But Not For Me or a floaty and breathless rendition of Bacharach/ David's The Look of Love. Sometimes she can be skittish and light-fingered, as she demonstrated during the band's slow lope through Let's Fall in Love. And sometimes she will attack the piano as if she is wielding an axe, hacking out great chordal lumps or banging out boogie-woogie, with her elbows flailing. In a black dress with her hair glinting gold under the lights, she is equal parts torch-balladeer and femme fatale. And when she stands up at the end of the set, towering over her bandmates, she's the boss.
Musically, the Krall band walk the line between jazz and cabaret, frequently spinning off into lengthy musical digressions without ever daring to wrench the material loose from its melodic moorings. In other words, when Krall plays All or Nothing at All, there's no danger of an atonal onslaught even if the band do slip into a rhumba interlude at the end. As a pianist, she's fluid and versatile, without ever threatening to bend the laws of physics like Thelonious Monk. But whether you call it jazz or pop, she has great taste in songs.
