Longtime (ha ha!) readers know that jazz isn't my strong suit and it's sort of secondary to the rock albums featured here. Throw vocals in the mix and you have a double-minority genre that I sometimes wonder how to classify. Thus far this year there have been two jazz vocal albums, both from the 1950's (Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown, and Ella & Louis). Diana Krall's work is about 40 years removed from these other albums, yet the whole notion of "vocal jazz" still challenges me. Even iTunes slapped it with a "pop" label when I downloaded the album data. While her singing wouldn't be all that strange in the modern pop scene (except nowadays she would probably have to autotune the crap out of herself), the song structures are pop-based, and Nat King Cole had a pop reputation, this album was released by a venerable jazz label (Impulse), and features very familiar jazz instrumentation and playing styles. To distinguish herself further from being "just another vocalist", Krall also does most of the piano work herself.
Nevertheless, Diana Krall always reminds me of working the sales floor at Borders. I think every store I worked at had her in the rotation at some point during the year (2005's Christmas Songs simply compounded the problem). It's not that I want to say this is non-jazz (see Kenny G - and I don't mean on this blog), but it is very "safe" music. Not the jazz of risk-taking, which I tend to favor. But when all else fails, I certainly recognize the importance of this album as a latter-day milestone of jazz, even if I'm not the target demographic.
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