In this 1997 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Diana Krall arrives in Toronto months after her fourth album Love Scenes, newly Grammy-nominated and still describing herself as a shy singer. She opens by apologising for two notes she did not mean to play — which turns out to be the right introduction to an hour in which the most self-effacing person in the room is the one with the nomination.
The centre of the conversation is the voice itself, and where it came from. Krall traces the low, unhurried contralto that became her signature back to a school choir that had no place for a girl who sang low, and to the feeling that she belonged in the back with the boys. The singing, she explains, was the part she kept secret; the piano was the part she was allowed to be good at. She had been working professionally since fifteen, and she talks about what Tony Bennett taught her about singing — advice from someone who had already decided the voice was worth taking seriously.
She also goes back to the beginning of the training: classical piano at four, in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, a long way from the American songbook she would end up defining for a generation of listeners.
What she could not know that autumn was how quickly it would turn. Two years later, When I Look in Your Eyes won a Grammy and earned a rare Album of the Year nomination for a jazz record, and Krall would go on to sell more than fifteen million albums worldwide. Unseen since it first aired, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
Episodes Available for Licensing
Found 1 episode
Search: "Diana Krall"