Jazz artist Diana Krall counts her lucky stars

As someone who improvises both in music and in life, jazz pianist Diana Krall considers herself a lucky person. Such luck — and considerable talent — have powered the Canadian chanteuse’s stellar career as one of the world’s leading jazz performers.

“I am not much of a planner,” Krall, 52, admits during a telephone interview from her home on Vancouver Island. “I just surround myself with players who are the best at what they do, and I am lucky because I get to do all kinds of things.”

Those “things” include both jazz standards and treatments of pop numbers she frequently performs, and her latest album Turn Up the Quiet, released May 5, features a cross section of them.

Krall launches a massive two-and-one-half-year tour June 2 in Minneapolis. It boasts 79 North American and European dates in 2017 alone. Krall and her combo will be making stops June 3 at Madison’s Overture Center for the Arts and June 4 at Milwaukee’s Riverside Theater.

The tour, like the album, will feature Krall’s meticulous Steinway concert-grand piano performances accompanied by her trademark husky contralto that breathes emotional life into her songs.

Telling a story

Krall admits that part of the appeal of her work is the material she chooses, which includes a large sampling from the so-called Great American Songbook to pop standards and less familiar works by the Eagles, Elton John, Bob Dylan and others.

“I never consider when a song may have been written, and I try to find a short story in all of them with room to improvise,” Krall says. “The story needs to have a depth of feeling that I can share in a way that touches the audience.

“I perform Irving Berlin’s ‘How Deep is the Ocean’ on this current tour that clearly tells a story,” Krall says of the seminal work that has been recorded by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Eric Clapton.

Then consider “Blue Skies,” another Berlin song Krall performs that appears on Turn Up the Quiet.

“You can listen to Ella Fitzgerald singing it or Thelonious Monk performing it,” she explains. “You realize at once how the song lends itself to creative jazz interpretation.”

Such interpretation also lends itself to seemingly simplistic songs like Tom Waits’ “Picture in a Frame” and Dylan’s “Wallflower,” both of which Krall performs and has recorded. In each case, the song’s emotional content far exceeds any lyrical complexity, giving Krall both the opportunity for creative jazz interpretation and an emotional touchstone for her audiences.

“My job is to make music that helps people feel, to tell the story and let people find their own version of it in their hearts,” she explains.

Jazz masters’ influence

However, jazz’s musical complexity and possibilities as an art form do not play second fiddle, so to speak, to the songs’ emotional content. Krall’s performances also come steeped in the influence of past jazz masters, which adds even greater depth to the numbers her group performs.

Lately, Krall has been revisiting Miles Davis, a musician that has had a profound affect on her performance style.

“Miles often played with a mute in his trumpet because he believed it helped his music sound more like a human voice,” she says. “I remember as a kid seeing a documentary featuring Miles Davis and (pianist and composer) Gil Evans in which they said how magical the music of Louis Armstrong was.

“That’s how Miles Davis and jazz are to me,” she adds. “Magical.”

Those feelings carry over to her performances in a genre that some feel may be fading from the musical scene. Is jazz a dying art form? Krall doesn’t think so.

“Think about what the character in La La Land said,” Krall says of Ryan Gosling’s role. “Jazz is exciting, new, modern, but it needs to be played in order to survive.”

Add Krall’s unique emotional content and jazz truly remains alive and well — and ready to make a statement.

“A jazz performance is all about the love we have and deeply sharing that experience,” Krall explains. “Each live performance is a deeply shared experience between audience and performer, and it’s something that will never happen the same way again.”

On stage

On June 3, Diana Krall brings her unique form of jazz to Overture Center for the Arts, 201 State St., Madison. Tickets are $59.50 to $125. Call the box office at 608-258-4141 or visit overturecenter.org. Krall and her combo will appear June 4 at the Riverside Theater, 116 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee. Tickets are $49 to $85. Call the box office at 414-286-3663 or visit pabsttheater.org.