12. Diana KrallThis Dream Of You
I make no apology for writing at length about my wife’s new record. She is, in every sense, a knockout. The work of the interpretive recording artist is something that I feel is less understood today than in the 1950s, when Sinatra was making his most enduring records. I believe this is because of the rise of the facile cover and all those gladiators shovelling glitter or dirt onto songs for the delectation of a talent contest jury. What I know is that it takes a very long time to get within a song in order to have anything to say of lasting worth. Assumptions made about any women known for a glamorous cover image, singing within a sophisticated studio production, risks the listener skating over the surface of a process they simply don’t understand. I sometimes wake in the small hours and hear a piano playing in another room. Sometimes it’s a dream, other times it isn’t.
I can work at a crowded kitchen table with the pressure cooker squealing and lads laughing and screaming their heads off and no one can reach me. What Diana does, requires still, concentrated hours, even years, to get down to a new way to hear, ‘How Deep Is The Ocean?’ and strip it of Broadway bombast and meditate on what other story may be within the song. This record has given me such joy, as I watched Diana revisit incomplete sessions from 2017 and, together with the master engineer, Al Schmitt, fashion these takes into a album for the present moment. Diana was a piano player long before she was a singer, starting out in local sports bars and desolate hotel residencies, where any or every tune might be requested and played for scant attention or for little reward. She was lucky to come from a family in which playing music for yourself was still part of daily life. In her late teens and early 20s, she took lessons with the genius accompanist Jimmy Rowles, the pianist Alan Broadbent and the bassist Ray Brown. All of this informs one of my favourite cuts on this record; an impromptu duo with bassist John Clayton on ‘I Wished On The Moon’, notes tumbling down like falling stars. Singers of true curiosity may reveal corners of songs others haven’t noticed or appreciated; the hymn of hope in ‘Autumn In New York’ and the closing deadpan glance over the shoulder of ‘Singing In The Rain’.
Such is the performance of ‘This Dream Of You’. Bob Dylan’s own rendition is fairly opaque but it is a composition of possibilities and resonance equal to those of Irving Berlin. Diana is joined by drummer Karriem Riggins, Dylan’s long-time bassist, Tony Garnier, guitarist Marc Ribot with Stuart Duncan’s Stroh’s violin – a device like a tiny gramophone horn that projects an eerie tone from the violin bridge – blending with the family accordion of Randall Krall. In the summer of 2019, I sat in L’Olympia in Paris and heard Diana and her band unveil this arrangement for an audience who very conceivably might have been discovering the song for the first time. I am so glad that there is now a record of it for you to share until we can all be together again.
