Only Trust Your Heart

Canadian singer/pianist Diana Krall moved up to an American major label, GRP Records, with her second album, Only Trust Your Heart, having made her debut, Stepping Out, with the Canadian independent Justin Time Records two year earlier. The approach is basically the same, although her supporting musicians are different. Tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine sits in on three tracks, "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?," "I Love Being Here with You," and the Ray Brown instrumental "CRS-Craft," but otherwise this is piano trio music, with drummer Lewis Nash and either Brown or Christian McBride on bass. Krall is a neo-traditionalist with a legitimate pedigree detailed by Michael Bourne in his liner notes: an isolated upbringing in British Columbia, playing her father's Fats Waller 78s; classical piano lessons while playing in the school jazz band; a Vancouver Jazz Festival scholarship to the Berklee College of Music; a Canadian Arts Council grant to study with Jimmy Rowles in Los Angeles. The result is a performer steeped in traditional acoustic jazz piano playing and singing, and Krall demonstrates her talents on this album, soloing freely on the tunes, which are mostly standards, of course, and singing in a sturdy alto. It says something about the state of jazz circa 1995 that, at age 30, such a performer was getting a big promotional push. Krall was much more than a pretty face and a wave of blonde hair playing old-fashioned jazz, but she was that, too. So, once again in major-label jazz, it was back to the future for a record that, for all intents and purposes, could have been recorded in 1954 instead of 1994, except, of course, that that would have been ten years before the artist was born. ~ William Ruhlmann