If the audience at the first show of Canadian diva Diana Krall's three-night London run came expecting a faithful copy of the pillow-talk music from her current album Quiet Nights, they didn't get it. But, judging by the cheers, they certainly didn't seem disappointed. Krall had chosen instead to roll through an upbeat two-hour jazz set, sounding as if she couldn't imagine anything more pleasurable than spending an evening around the piano with 5,000 strangers.
There were fewer pin-drop moments and rather more amiably rambling family anecdotes than usual – but also a lot more piano-playing and jazz quotes. So the hardliners (including me) who believe she long ago abandoned her roots for the easy-listening market had, on this occasion, to back off.
Late in the show, Krall and her guitarist Anthony Wilson even left the smoochy script of Boy from Ipanema to veer into Count Basie's cannily swinging Jive at Five. She let out a chortle of delight as Wilson caught her drift. This typified the whole gig. Wilson, bassist Robert Hurst, and particularly drummer (and sometime hip-hop producer) Karriem Riggins brought a changed attack to the Krall road-band. It would be hard to imagine Riggins's roaring percussion engine purring quietly through a low-lights set.
Krall snapped her fingers into a flying tempo on I Love Being Here With You, to which Wilson initially seemed to be clinging by his fingernails. Let's Fall in Love and I've Grown Accustomed to His Face indicated that the singer's languid timing and swooping note-bends are now often augmented by an increasingly cavalier (almost Van Morrison-like) distortion of the way words sound. So Nice was a cool Latin swinger, and Nat King Cole's The Frim Fram Sauce had a breezy Fats Waller piano intro and a superb double-time bass break.
Krall arrived at Walk On By via a fragile piano medley of Bacharach themes before turning the softly stepping song into a defiantly soulful anthem. She filled the room with the quietest confidences and almost sax-like exhalations of air on delicate accounts of Joni Mitchell's I Could Drink a Case of You and Jobim's Quiet Nights. The encore was Departure Bay, a tribute to Krall's late mother, written with her husband Elvis Costello. It brought the show back to the muted territory Diana Krall more usually occupies – but the contrasts of the evening seemed only to heighten its haunting eloquence.
Diana Krall plays the Royal Albert Hall, Friday, 30 October. Box office: 0207 789 8212
