Diana Krall

Jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall has released a dozen albums in the two decades she's been performing professionally. Her latest album, the bossa-nova-tinged Quiet Nights, might be her most romantic effort to date. She has said the album is very womanly — "like you're lying next to your lover in bed whispering this in their ear." Indeed, the singer is sublime throughout, recalling Julie London or Dusty Springfield at times, crooning over the slow and breezy string orchestrations by famed arranger Claus Ogerman, who arranged many of the first wave of bossa nova albums by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto. Quiet Nights feels like a continuation of Krall's 2001 The Look of Love, which Ogerman also arranged. And while some of the string arrangements on recent efforts might seem indulgent, especially compared with Krall's early trio albums, 2004's The Girl in the Other Room — for which she co-wrote nearly half the songs with her husband, Elvis Costello — is a great album sans the strings.