Diana Krall

Diana [Jean] Krall OC, OBC, was born in 1964 in Nanaimo, BC. As a jazz singer and pianist, she is known for her contralto vocals, selling more than 6 million albums in the US and over 15 million, worldwide. In 2009 Billboard magazine named her the second most important jazz artist of the first decade of this century, establishing her as the one of the best-selling artists of her time, having won three Grammy awards and eight Junos, and she has a multitude of gold and platinum albums to her name..

Her father played piano and her mother sang in a community choir. Playing the piano herself at the age of four; at 15, Diana was playing jazz in a local restaurant.  She went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship, before heading out to Los Angeles to play jazz, returning to Canada to release her first album in 1993.

In, 2000, Diana Krall was paired on a 20 city tour with Tony Bennett, following it with her own world tour in 2001. In 2003 she and Elvis Costello were married at Elton John’s estate outside London and their twin sons were born in 2006 in New York City.

 Having lost her mother to multiple myeloma in 2002, Diana has done much in fund-raising to fight this affliction and is an honorary Board Member of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.

Diana has been the recipient of many honours. In 2000, she was awarded the Order of British Columbia. In 2003, she was given an honorary Ph.D. [Fine Arts] from the University of British Columbia. In 2004, inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame and in 2005 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.  In 2008, Nanaimo Harbourfront Plaza was renamed Diana Krall Plaza.