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	DIANA KRALL No fences

Diana Krall introduced the fourth tune of her FleetBoston Pavilion show a week ago Tuesday as being written by "a really good friend of mine — who I married. . . . He’s happier and I’m angrier." The "really good friend" would be Elvis Costello, and Krall was joking about her new husband’s reputed acid sarcasm and her own reputed cool. She sang the album’s title tune, which she wrote with Costello, with the stage bathed in red light. It was easy to hear Costello in the blueish melody of "The girl in the other room/She knows by now/There’s something in all of her fears." But for that matter, it was easy to hear him in the lyrics when Krall covered Mose Allison: "Stop this world/Let me off/There’s just too many pigs in the same trough."

Krall worked with Costello on a handful of tunes from her new Verve release, The Girl in the Other Room (he usually on lyrics, she on the music, though in some cases they share credit for both). The CD represents her first recorded foray into songwriting, and if he’s helping her express some of her melancholy, "angry" side, at the Pavilion she still presented herself as a hardworking jazz pianist and singer who happens to cover contemporary pop. She entered swinging with an untitled new instrumental original, then turned to face the audience on her piano bench, legs crossed, while she sang accompanied only by Robert Hurst’s bass, Jack Lawrence’s circa 1940 standard "All or Nothing at All." And she introduced Costello’s jazz-standard wanna-be "Almost Blue" with impressionist Bill Evans–like chords, singing the word "blue" with a touch of Costello-like vibrato.

The 100-minute set offered everything Krall can do. She followed the sultry rumba of Tom Waits’s "Temptation" with Irving Berlin’s "Let’s Face the Music and Dance," which shifted between bossa rhythms and a hard, swinging four. She played and sang Bob Dorough & Terrell Kirk’s "Devil May Care" way up, cutting into "Don’t even stop for a sigh/It doesn’t help if you cry" with appropriate abandon, letting guitarist Anthony Wilson loose on his fiercest solo of the night and applauding drummer Peter Erskine’s only solo of the night. A piano-and-voice rendition of Cole Porter’s "Don’t Fence Me In" had led into "Devil May Care," and when on introducing the next Krall/Costello number she was greeted with shouted requests for more standards, she responded with a reprise of the Porter. She wasn’t afraid to go for chamber-jazz introspection in front of the near-capacity Pavilion crowd, ending "Temptation" with a hush as she played with her left hand damping down the piano strings. She was a jazz artist with pop tastes long before she met Costello, and in fact, that vibrato’s been there all along too.