When Diana Krall arrived in England last week, en route to play a concert in Wigan, she was joking with one of the men at customs. He asked what kind of music she played. "I said we were here to play the music of George Formby, and he looked at me and said `How old are you?' And I had no idea that George Formby was from Wigan. So we're here in Wigan, and I walked into the hotel and there's an area that says `George Formby Room' and I couldn't believe it."
Just as astonishing is the fact that Krall had even heard of Formby. She is, after all, from a tiny place called Nanaimo, thousands of miles and an ocean away from Wigan, in British Columbia; she's also only 33 and, not incidentally, one of the hottest properties on the current international jazz scene.
All that is several worlds removed from Formby, a singer and comedian born almost a century ago. He was a music hall veteran with a gormless grin and a voice you could wrap fish and chips in, who played a ukelele - which is like a very sick guitar - and was Britain's top box office attraction 60 years ago with songs like I'm Standing At The Lamppost At The Corner Of The Street. And that, by the way, was not a global canine anthem; he was merely waiting "in case a certain little lady comes by".
So how could she possibly have known of him? The answer gives a clue to her richly varied musical background and to a significant quality in her own singing - that though many of the songs she does are from the Great American Song Book, there's no sense that it is a nostalgia trip. It's something she's very aware of when she talks about growing up in Nanaimo.
"People sort of Norman Rockwell-ise it," she says. "You know, being at my grandmother's house and playing. My grandparents' house was like the local pub when my father was growing up, so we would go over on Sundays. It wasn't something we consciously did. We all loved to sing and that's just what we did."
It is so strongly reminiscent of family gatherings in Dublin, a half-century or more ago, that I mention it to her. "Oh, my God," she said. "Do you know When Father Papered The Parlour?" It was, I admit, an old music hall hit and a party piece of my great aunt's.
"You're the only person in life, besides my dad, who does," she laughs. "That's the kind of stuff that we sing. And Oh, By Jingo and Scottish songs. My uncle played accordion, and my dad did a bit. My history on my father's side is Czech and I'm of Irish-English-Scottish descent. We had a lot of that kind of music at home." In other words, it was all part of the musical furniture.
The domestic musical chairs also included jazz and early dance band recordings - Jean Goldkette, Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, Bill Challis. "My dad collects gramophones, so we have about 14 in the house, and still when I go home we play crib or we play rummy after dinner and my dad just puts a stack of '78s on and I don't even know what I'm listening to half the time - everything from Duke Ellington to Spike Jones, but more rare recordings of, like, early American popular music. He has cylinders as well, so I heard early Edison recordings."
Her piano playing, much affected by hearing records of Nat King Cole (who was at the cutting edge of jazz piano long before he made it as a singer), is a relaxed, well-integrated thing, with traces of players as diverse as Ahmad Jamal, George Shearing, Bill Evans and the late Jimmy Rowles, a quirkily individual player hugely respected as a soloist and accompanist, who knew the changes of literally hundreds of songs, some very obscure.
She studied with him at one stage. Long before that, she had begun classical piano at four, played in jazz bands in her teens and won a Vancouver Jazz Festival scholarship in 1981 to study at Boston's famed Berklee College of Music. Back in Nanaimo - where she had started professionally at 15 - she was heard by the great bassist from the Oscar Peterson Trio, Ray Brown, who suggested she move to Los Angeles to study with Rowles.
Besides knowing the changes, Rowles also knew the lyrics of the songs - and was a hugely funny, idiosyncratic interpreter of the words at times. But it was his piano that really intrigued her.
"He was a very complex player," she says, "I think, coming out of Art Tatum, and his work was influenced from all the singers he worked with, and especially coming from Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington and Ravel - he was a very open-minded person as well. And I was influenced by Ahmad Jamal and Hank Jones. Hank Jones is incredible. And George Shearing, too, for harmony. People look at him as being very conservative, but when I listen to his records, they're not conservative at all."
Her own interest in the dual role of pianist and singer was fuelled by a whole range of classy examples of the genre, notably Nat King Cole, Shirley Horn and Nina Simone, as well as by Dinah Washington, Roberta Flack and Carmen McRae. Of these, probably closest to her emotionally are Cole, Horn and McRae; all intimate singers, more conversationalists than belters.
It was clearly a long, slow process of absorption, both conscious and subconscious, which produced the richly talented artist she is today. Three years on the West Coast and a spell in Toronto were followed by a move to New York in 1990 and a regular gig with her own trio in nearby Boston. And a gradual public appreciation that she was something out of the ordinary, which has turned into a major breakthrough and crossover into popular appeal. It's not on the scale of Sting (another whose work she likes), but in jazz terms it's major enough.
Her voice is smoky, with a lived-in, but not world-weary, quality. Its phrasing is exquisitely sensitive; the liberties she takes with the melodic line are minimal - mostly it's in the phrasing and dynamics, simultaneously knowing and instinctual, that she weaves her sometimes disturbing spell - but everything is placed at the service of the lyrics. And these, in her very personal interpretations, are no museum pieces to be trotted out for the jaded ignorance of the apres-diner set. Moreover, they're very carefully picked, not only for what they offer as jazz instrumental vehicles to her trio, but also for how they sit with her feeling for the words.
"I guess I have to be able to somehow feel the lyrics are timeless, that they fit what I believe, that it's like a story," she said. "I don't have to live the lyrics, but I have to have compassion for other people, and understanding. It's very important to me that you're telling a story and you're telling it simply. It's about making people relate to that, whatever their story is, not giving it away and saying `OK, this is what the song's about'. I like to leave a lot of interpretation open to the listener." Classic popular composers - Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Harry Warren, Sigmund Romberg, Irving Berlin - and some of the handful of later talents fit to lace their boots, among them Dave Frishberg, Bobby Troup and Luiz Bonfa, are represented on Krall's latest album, Love Scenes, a trio recording with the excellent guitarist, Russell Malone, and the great bassist, Christian McBride, which is her finest yet. Malone will be in Dublin with her; McBride's place will be taken by Paul Keller. "We're not trying to make hit records," she says. "We're not trying to be popular or to fulfil anything other than make really good music. And I'm doing songs that I like without worrying about whether I'm a jazz musician or not. I know already that these are my roots, so I'm not trying to prove anything other than play songs that I like and hopefully people will like them."
And they do.
Diana Krall plays Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin, tomorrow and Sunday at 8 p.m. Tel: (01) 670 9202.
