It wasn't the typical
Red Rocks crowd.
The cars in the parking lot were a little nicer. The fans walking into the venue
were a little more sober. And the music of the evening was a little jazzier. The majority of the men wore all different varieties and colors of Hawaiian shirts (I didn't get the memo or the reason). Everyone was there for the music of the Great American Song Book performed by
Diana Krall and the
Colorado Symphony.
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| The Colorado Symphony - All photos by the Rock and Roll Princess |
Christopher Dragon, the talented assistant conductor with cartoon like facial expressions, set the tone. Dragon described growing up in Australia wishing to be a piano player/singer like
Diana Krall. His life didn't exactly follow her path, but Dragon happily led the symphony through classic American standards to warm up the crowd. The
Colorado Symphony played
Louis Armstrong,
Cole Porter, and
George Gershwin's An American in Paris. Christopher Dragon warned, "the song is
not about
that famous American (the one with that Twitter account) that recently went to Paris."
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| Diana Krall and her band |
Diana Krall started playing piano at the age of four in Canada (her family was so Canadian that her brother was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police). After attending the
Berklee College of Music on a scholarship, she moved to Los Angeles, California to play jazz (her brother stayed in Canada with his horse). Success soon followed with collaborations with
Tony Bennett,
Ray Charles, and
Sir Paul McCartney (to name only a few). She later married some funny looking dude with glasses named
Elvis Costello (they have twin ten year old boys).
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| Diana Krall |
The percussion section was removed (Krall has her own drummer). Her world-class arranger
Alan Broadbent replaced
Christopher Dragon as the conductor. That's when
Diana Krall and her band took their places in front of the
Colorado Symphony. Wearing a blue dress with white stars (an artist that has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide doesn't simply wear polka dots). Krall expressed how excited she was to be playing
Red Rocks. "I don't usually speak before I start, but who cares. I'm excited." That was her introduction to
Do I Love You. The track featured the amazing guitarist and
Eric Clapton doppelgänger
Anthony Wilson. It also spotlighted Krall's amazing piano playing. Her fingers danced across her keyboard with incredible grace and speed. Krall followed that with
George and Ira Gershwin's I Was Doing All Right (made famous by
Ella Fitzgerald in 1959), and
Cole Porter's Night and Day.
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| Diana Krall, her jazz band, and the Colorado Symphony |
My favorite song of the night was
Tom Wait's Temptation - "Rusted brandy in a diamond glass/Everything is made from dreams/Time is made from honey slow and sweet/Only the fools know what it means." It was reassuring to hear that one of my favorite songwriters can hold his own against
Gershwin and
Porter when performed by the jazz siren
Diana Krall.
A sudden gust of wind blew her sheet music up into the lighting rigs. Just as if it was planned, Krall played the tornado theme music from
The Wizard of Oz as members of the symphony caught the papers. That's when
Diana Krall admitted that she couldn't really read the music without her glasses. "But you people can't handle me in glasses." That's the moment she played
Eddie DeLange's 1933 classic
Moonglow. The lyrics summed up the evening perfectly, "
We seemed to float right through the air/Heavenly songs seemed to come from everywhere."
See you at the next show. I'll be the one chasing after sheet music in a colorful Hawaiian shirt in the moon glow.
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