Lengthy consigned to pop music’s margins since its Thirties and 40s heyday, jazz loved a stunning renaissance in 2000 when a 35-year-old Canadian feminine pianist and singer named Diana Krall scooped the Grammy Award for Finest Jazz Vocal Efficiency. The album, recorded a 12 months earlier, additionally gained the Grammy for Finest Engineered Album – Non-Classical, awarded to the esteemed veteran audio engineer Al Schmitt. Thrust into the media highlight by its Grammy successes, After I Look In Your Eyes shortly introduced Diana Krall mainstream recognition, reworking her right into a bonafide star.
After I Look In Your Eyes was Krall’s debut for Verve Information, the revered jazz label based by music impresario Norman Granz in 1956 as a automobile to advertise singer Ella Fitzgerald. It was additionally Krall’s fourth consecutive album working with famous jazz producer Tommy LiPuma and his trusty longtime sidekick, the late Al Schmitt, who noticed Krall mature and blossom as her profession progressed. “She just got better every time I worked with her,” recalled the engineer to this author in 2017. “It was wonderful to watch. Every time she was in the studio, she learned something.”
Hearken to Diana Krall’s After I Look In Your Eyes now.
Describing her two elder studio mentors as “a great team,” Krall confessed she found a kindred spirit in her producer, LiPuma, who nurtured and impressed her. “We’re like married, as far as a musical relationship goes,” she joked in 2001. “He’s like another artist: He’s so into the music and that’s his first and foremost priority.”
LiPuma surrounded Krall with a cadre of top-notch musicians for the session, together with a core rhythm part comprising guitarist Russell Malone, bassist John Clayton, and drummer Jeff Hamilton. He additionally introduced on board the veteran composer/arranger Johnny Mandel on seven cuts as a co-producer, arranger, and conductor.
The album largely explored The Nice American Songbook, an enormous repository of fabric primarily written within the Nineteen Twenties, 30s, and 40s. Irving Berlin’s evergreen “Let’s Face The Music And Dance,” was reworked right into a smoulderingly sensuous bossa nova, the place Krall’s sultry voice and delicate piano have been enhanced by Mandel’s finely nuanced orchestration. The same lush late-night Brazilian therapy, full with mild harp cascades, was given to Krall’s intimate remake of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” a monitor indelibly related to Frank Sinatra. Krall, nonetheless, made it her personal, infusing it with a way of deep intimacy and languorous longing.
Actually, Krall excelled on the album’s lush slower numbers, which revealed her affinity for storytelling ballads and recast her as a torch singer par excellence. However she additionally confirmed she might swing together with her renderings of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” a duo with guitarist Russell Malone, and “Devil May Care,” a drumless trio quantity, which was propelled by an infectious, toe-tapping joie de vivre. Exhibiting her repertoire wasn’t confined to The Nice American Songbook, she included a playful studying of singer/songwriter Michael Franks’ 1976 tune, “Popsicle Toes.”
Along with peaking at No. 56 on The Billboard 200, After I Look In Your Eyes spent 32 weeks on the summit of the US Jazz Albums chart, finally racking up quintuple-platinum gross sales figures. The album additionally did tremendously properly abroad, significantly within the UK and France, bringing Krall worldwide renown.
Her repute enhanced by her Grammy triumph, Krall undertook a 20-date US tour in August 2000 with legendary singer Tony Bennett, later showing on his 2001 duets album, Playin’ With My Mates: Bennett Sings The Blues. On the time, Bennett described Krall as a jazz nice within the making. “She’s a natural,” he enthused. “She sings and plays beautiful piano. The minute she starts performing she acquires permanent fans.”
Though her subsequent album, 2001’s The Look Of Love was even greater commercially and would see Krall increase her viewers additional, After I Look In Your Eyes was the all-important breakthrough album that put the Canadian chanteuse on the radar of mainstream music patrons and topped her a jazz queen for the noughties.
Hearken to Diana Krall’s After I Look In Your Eyes now.
