At 15, Diana Krall was playing background piano for diners in a restaurant in Nanaimo, British Columbia, a rugged logging and ferry town on Vancouver Island. She went on to become the only jazz singer to have eight albums debut at the top of the Billboard Jazz charts and to sell over 15 million records. This episode examines how an acoustic pianist singing decades-old standards captured mainstream attention in an era of nu metal and hip hop without diluting the music, starting with her contralto voice and the psychoacoustic intimacy it creates.

We trace her Royal Conservatory training, high school jazz band, Berklee scholarship from 1981 to 1983 and her mentorship by bassist Ray Brown, described here as learning the local slang of jazz after the formal grammar. From her 1993 debut Stepping Out with John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton, producer T ...