You can hear the room in From This Moment On, and that’s the whole point. Diana Krall and her trio recorded these sessions at L’OlympBruno Coquatrix in Paris over three nights in June 2005, and the engineer—whoever was behind the desk—understood that the best jazz recording is one where you forget you’re listening to a recording. No studio gloss, no overdubs, no second takes masked by production. Just a pianist, a bassist, a drummer, and standards that have survived because they still have blood in them.
Krall was 26. She’d already made When I Want You, which caught attention, and Live in Paris before that, but this one—produced by Krall herself alongside Tommy LiPuma, the man who made Diana Krall a household name in the 2000s—feels like the moment she stopped trying to prove anything and started playing. The trio was tight: Marc Moulin on bass, Shelly Manne’s son on drums (no, wait—it was Jimmy Cobb, the drummer from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, which tells you everything). The piano was a Steinway grand, and Krall’s touch is precise without being precious.
What the Standards Sound Like Here
“From This Moment On” itself is a Cole Porter tune that feels like it was written for someone with her particular blend of restraint and swing. She doesn’t overstate the melody. The left hand is conversational, never fighting for attention. You notice the harmonic choices—small turnarounds, a chord substitution that makes sense only if you’ve thought hard about how the tune actually wants to breathe.
On “Temptation,” she reaches a little deeper, lets the tempo slip, finds the blues buried under the elegance. There’s a moment around the two-minute mark where the bass locks with the drums and Krall’s right hand just hangs there, holding a note that should resolve but doesn’t, not yet. That’s not accident. That’s the work of someone who has spent years in practice rooms understanding what a listener actually feels when a chord is withheld.
The album moves through the familiar repertoire—Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, a little Ellington—but what matters is how she sits with each tune. Never rushing. Never inflecting for effect. There’s a coolness to it, a European sensibility, maybe from all those years she spent studying in Los Angeles and London before she settled back in Canada. She sounds like she’s thinking about these songs at three in the morning, not performing them for applause.
The Sound
On good speakers, this album is a masterclass in what a piano actually sounds like when it’s recorded with discipline and played with intent. The stereo image is wide but not theatrical. The bass note has weight without bloom. Her touch on the keys—the slight percussive attack before the sustain—is clearly audible, and it’s never the same twice. That variation, that tiny humanity in each stroke, is what separates a real performance from a perfect take.
The rhythm section never overplays, and that’s the secret. So many jazz piano trios get buried under drumming that’s trying too hard to swing. Here, the drums are almost submerged in the mix, just enough to anchor the pulse without demanding attention. The bass is present but not dominant. The piano is front-and-center because it should be, because this is a piano album, and Krall isn’t apologizing for that.
This is what the jazz standards sound like when they’re not treated like museum pieces. They’re still living, still capable of surprise, still worth the attention of someone who has the technical skill and the emotional patience to let them speak.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Live recording from Paris captures room ambience without studio overdubs.
- Krall was 26, collaborating with legendary producer Tommy LiPuma on album.
- Drummer Jimmy Cobb played on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.
- Left hand stays conversational, never competing with melodic right hand.
- Krall withholds chord resolution deliberately for emotional impact on listener.
- Standards stripped bare reveal harmonic choices and deliberate pacing decisions.