Music to live by: singer Diana Krall's interpretations of old American standards are perfectly in tune with the need of many listeners to rediscover a sense of beauty and universal truth in the aftermath of Sept. 11

Insight on the News, May 6, 2002 by John Berlau

Many industries were hit hard in the wake of the events of Sept. 11: financial services, restaurants and travel, to name a few. But seven months later the American public's reaction to the terrorist attacks appears also to have had an impact on the music business, an industry with no obvious connection to the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

By all measures, 9/11 accelerated trends that have devastated the music industry. After growing for years, record sales are falling by substantial numbers. In the first two weeks after Thanksgiving, when Christmas shopping traditionally is in full swing, album sales were down an alarming 15 percent from the previous year, according to a SoundScan survey. "Major labels have been battered by losses and layoffs, radio-station owners are wallowing in an advertising recession and the concert business lost millions of ticket buyers in just the last year," writes music journalist Eric Boehlert on Salon.com.

Music-industry experts give many reasons for this downturn, including consumers having been hit by the recession and technologies that make it easy to copy songs from compact discs. But few have noticed that the decline in music sales is not uniform. Since the terrorist attacks, there has been a surge in music that resonates with the public's mood. Sales of contemporary Christian and gospel music have increased. Country singer Alan Jackson's album Drive, which features the ballad "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," a touching remembrance of Sept. 11., sold almost 500,000 copies the week of its release and rocketed to No. 1 on the pop chart.

But perhaps the best indicator of a countertrend to declining sales in contemporary music is the surprisingly strong success of a beautiful jazz singer and pianist from Canada. Diana Krall won a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance of 2000, and expectations were high for her new album, The Look of Love, when it hit record stores on Sept. 17, 2001. But a week before the record was released, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people. The slick publicity machine that helped make Krall, 37, the top-selling contemporary jazz artist stumbled to a halt even though it was too late to postpone the album's release. The CDs already were on their way to the stores.

Even so, Krall and her record company, the Verve Music Group, postponed public appearances considered crucial to launching a new album. Krall, who divides her time between New York City and Vancouver, flew back from London as soon as she could and spent the week grieving among her neighbors in Greenwich Village, about two miles from ground zero. "I went to church and listened to Brahms' `Requiem' and wept with everybody else," Krall recalls to Insight. "Listening helped me with those emotions."

In the meantime, no one knew how the attacks would affect sales of Krall's new album, but no one predicted what happened next. More than 150,000 albums were sold the first week, a figure similar to first-week sales of hit rock and rap albums. The Look of Love debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard pop-albums chart, the first time a jazz album ever had opened in the top 10. Krall was named one of People magazine's 25 Most Intriguing People of 2001. In January, the album went platinum, selling more than 1 million copies in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Normally, a jazz album is considered successful if it sells 30,000 copies.

Some observers tell Insight it's no coincidence that Krall's music sold so well so soon after Sept. 11. Under the circumstances, they say, most Americans just couldn't handle the vulgarity and nihilism of today's pop music, and Krall's tender interpretations of American standards were just what they were looking for.

Conservative Terry Teachout, a music critic for Time and Commentary magazines, sees Krall's rise as a sign of what could be a return of beauty to American music and art. "She's a romantic singing romantic ballads in a very striking and beautiful way," Teachout tells Insight. "She'd already had great success before 9/11 obviously, but I think since then the appetite for beauty, the need for beauty, has increased considerably, as I suspect it always does in a time of war. And there she was with an exceptionally beautiful album, and people went out and started buying it by the carload."

Teachout has been following Krall since she released her first American album, Only Trust Your Heart, in 1995. When that album was released, he helped jump-start Krall's career by describing her voice as being "like wild honey with a spoonful of scotch" in an article for the Wall Street Journal. It is a voice that likewise has been described as smoky, sultry and sexy. Krall doesn't belt out a tune, but has a low, contralto voice that is confident and self-assured. And she knows how to massage the microphone, giving an intimate reading to lyrics and making listeners feel she is speaking directly to them.