The year was 1962.

In April, Frank Sinatra embarked on a two-month World Tour for Children, performing in 30 shows in 12 countries, with the Bill Miller Sextet. His June 7, 1962 concert in Paris was recorded but not released until 1994 as Sinatra & Sextet: Live in Paris. Some consider it one of the best recordings of his career.

The tour was exhausting but personally satisfying, and when Sinatra returned home in late June, he'd raised more than a million dollars for children's charities worldwide. He was the tour's sole sponsor, underwriting the expenses himself, for all the musicians and technical crew.

Fifty years later, Kurt Elling Swings Sinatra celebrates this album of Sinatra in peak form, as only Kurt can do, with richly told stories of a fascinating moment in time.

Kurt is joined by his own sextet, featuring special guests Joel Frahm on tenor sax and Brandon Lee on trumpet, with Clark Sommers, bass, Lewis Nash, drums, and his long-time musical director and collaborator, Laurence Hobgood on piano.

Kurt Elling Swings Sinatra comes to the East Coast at the end of April, with performances in New York, Vineland, NJ, and Philadelphia, and in mid-May in Pittsburgh.

Kurt Elling has been awarded the ECHO Jazz Prize 2012 as International Male Singer of the Year for his 2011 album, The Gate!

The ECHO Jazz Prize is the German equivalent of the Grammy.

The ECHO Jazz Prizes are awarded in 30 categories for albums released between November 2, 12010 and October 31, 2011 which also received at least two oustanding reviews from music journalists. Winners were selected by twelve jurors from the music industry from a field of 230 nominations.

The ECHO is an established and well-known music awards in the world presented by the German Phono Academy, the cultural arm of the Music Industry Association, honoring outstanding achievements and successful national and international artists. The ECHO Klassik Prize was first awarded in 1994, and the Jazz Prize was added in 2010.

The date and the location of the award ceremony will be announced in May.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Kurt Elling has been nominated as Male Singer of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA)! The other nominees in this category are Freddy Cole, Giacomo Gates, and Gregory Porter.

Kurt has won the JJA Jazz Award seven times in the past, including every year since 2009.

The winners of the 2012 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards will be selected from the nearly 200 nominees through voting by the JJA's international membership of writers, photographers, broadcasters and new media producers professionally involved with jazz.

The 16th annual JJA Jazz Awards Ceremony will be held June 20, 2012 from 4:00-6:00 pm at the Blue Note Jazz Club, 131 West 3rd St., New York, NY.

There will also be Satellite Parties in other cities. As of mid-April, parties are planned for Boston; Atlanta; Tucson; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Saratoga Springs, New York; Tallahassee and Gainesville, Florida; Ottawa, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand.

The full list of nominees is here.

Nominees in the first 38 categories were chosen by the votes of the Professional Journalist Members of the Jazz Journalists Association. Nominations were made on the basis of work done in calendar year 2011, with the exception of Lifetime Achievement Awards categories, in which nominations are for a lifetime body of work. Members and others were able to submit their own work for nomination in the Best Liner Notes and Photo of the Year categories. Best Shortform Online Video of the Year nominees were selected by a committee of JJA videographers.

Congratulations to each and every one of them!

From March 19-24, 2012 eight very talented young arrangers, chosen from about 200 applicants, participated in the 2012 Metropole Orkest's International Arrangers Workshop. Vince Mendoza, conductor of the Metropole Orkest, declared, "Of the 15 years that we've been doing this, this is the finest group of students that I've seen here -- or anywhere for that matter."

Introducing the eight arrangers:

Rasmus Puur (Estonia)
Malte Schiller (Germany)
Laura Winkler (Austria)
Vidjay Beerepoot (The Netherlands)
Christian Elsässer (Germany)
Daniel Jamieson (Canada)
Erica Seguine (USA)
Jesse Passenier (The Netherlands)

Each wrote an arrangement for Kurt Elling to perform at the Grand Finale Concert in Rotterdam on March 24.

Kurt said later, "I was deeply impressed by ALL of the arrangements. They uniformly reflected deep musical intelligence and communicated transparent emotion. I thank all the fine young arrangers for their dedication to craftsmanship and hard work. I look forward to performing these with the orchestra once again at the The Meer Jazz Festival in Hoofddorp, NL on June 2  . . . and well into the future."

Selections from the concert were broadcast over two weekends on Co Live!, the Soul & Jazz radio program hosted by Co de Kloet on Radio 6 in The Netherlands.  Those are are now available as podcasts for your listening pleasure.  The full broadcasts are four hours each.  The segments with Kurt and the Metropole Orkest are listed below.

Part 1: Sunday, March 25, 2012
From 2:22:50-2:25:00 Kurt describes the tunes and their selection.

From 2:27:25 to 2:58:35 Vince Mendoza introduces Kurt and they play:
Butterfly (Herbie Hancock) - Rasmus Puur, arranger
Speak No Evil (Wayne Shorter / lyric by Kurt Elling) - Malte Schiller, arranger
Duke Ellington's Sounds of Love (Charles Mingus) - Laura Winkler, arranger
Tempted (Squeeze) - Vidjay Beerepoot, arranger

Part 2:  Sunday, April 1, 2012
Beginning at 2:02:50, the Metropole Orkest plays:
A Streetcar Named Desire (Alex North)

From 2:13:10 to 2:38:00 they perform:
An American Tune (Paul Simon) - Christian Elsässer, arranger
Late Night Willie (Keith Jarrett / lyric by Kurt Elling) - Daniel Jamieson, arranger
Time To Say Goodbye (Joe Zawinul / lyric by Kurt Elling) - Erica Seguine, arranger

From 2:40:30 to 2:47:25 they perform:
Tutti For Cootie (Duke Ellington / lyric by Kurt Elling) - Jesse Passenier, arranger

From 2:47:55 to 2:55:50 there is an interview and they conclude with:
Esperanto (Vince Mendoza / lyric by Kurt Elling) - Vince Mendoza, arranger

And if you'd like to read Kurt's new lyrics for Speak No Evil and Late Night Willie, they're in Kurt's book, LYRICS, Second Edition, now available in the Kurt Store. Time to Say Goodbye and Esperanto are included, too.

Again this year, Kurt was nominated for a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album -- this time for The Gate. Every one of Kurt's recordings has been nominated, and he won two years ago for Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman.

Alas, he didn't win this year, but he did cut a fine figure on the Red Carpet.

Watch Kurt's short Grammy Red Carpet interview here.

Kurt commented later:

I had a great time! I've been fortunate because I've been able to go several times, and I was a volunteer before, and I've got so many friends to see that I don't otherwise get to connect with.

And the Grammys have updated the pre-telecast so remarkably since I was first involved that you really have a sense of an occasion as opposed to feeling like second or third class citizens, as it used to. They do the full red carpet treatment and you feel like it's a real occasion. So it's worth doing.

Just before the Grammy awards, Kurt was the celebrity guest on National Public Radio's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! - The Oddly Informative News Quiz show.  He played "Not My Job," a three-question multiple-choice quiz. Laugh-out-loud hilarity ensues!

Listen to Kurt's cover of Ke$ha's "We R Who We R," his answer to say "something in jazz," and his scat-talking (which sounds suspiciously like Danish).

The game he's invited to play is "Dude, First Thing You Need to Do, Get a Drum Machine." His quiz questions are on other Grammy nominees -- Bruno Mars, Adele, and Bon Iver.

So did he win the prize for the listener in Boca Raton, Florida?  Listen to Kurt's 10:05 "Not My Job" segment to find out!  You can also read the transcript, but the spoken word is much funnier.

From January 29 to February 5, 2012, Kurt Elling joined with a stellar cast of 44 artists/groups playing all jazz all the time on The Jazz Cruise.

They sailed from Fort Lauderdale, FL, with stops in Aruba, Curaçao, and Half Moon Cay, and back to Florida. It was Kurt's first Jazz Cruise, and he and the Quintet had a fabulous time.

Kurt performed half a dozen shows during the Cruise.

Lee Mergner, Editor-in-Chief of JazzTimes, shared his impressions of the Jazz Cruise and Kurt's performances:

Ask any cruise-goer for their musical highlight and you're likely to hear widely divergent choices. Jazz is, after all, a short word for a lot of different music and styles. For this somewhat jaded listener, the favorites tended to be artists or performances I had never seen before, and there were a surprisingly large number of those. I guess I need to get out more, or at least widen my choices.

Kurt Elling was an artist whom I have seen many times over the years, but seeing him perform a half-dozen very different sets (he tried to not repeat any songs all week) with his working band of Laurence Hobgood, Clark Sommers, Kobie Watkins and John McLean gave me even more regard for his considerable singing and performing talents, and more appreciation for his excellent band.

Elling did songs from every era of his now 17-year career and didn't hesitate to mix up the arrangements and repertoire, letting the air or tempo out of some tunes and speeding others up to a breakneck pace. His command of the stage and spontaneous repartee with the not-the-least-bit-shy audience showed the value of all of those years. He even riffed his way through a few onstage soundchecks. A truly modernist jazz singer, described by JT's Nate Chinen as 'the most influential jazz vocalist of our time,' Elling won over the traditionalists in the crowd.

JazzTimes also videotaped a series of interviews with artists on the Jazz Cruise.

Kurt's interviews are in Kurt Elling: Straight Ahead, by Lee Mergner, who wrote: "Earlier this year, Elling made his first appearance on The Jazz Cruise, where he performed multiple sets with his working group of Laurence Hobgood, John McLean, Clark Sommers and Kobie Watkins, rarely even repeating a song. A hit among the cruise regulars, he also sat in with Ann Hampton-Callaway and other artists and sang with the All-Star big band."

Watch:  Kurt Elling on The Jazz Cruise (03:00)

Watch:  Kurt Elling on his early musical development as a jazz singer (04:25)

Watch:  Kurt Elling on his future projects (03:27)

In his own set of interview segments for In Person with JazzTimes, Laurence Hobgood spoke about his early development as a pianist, his teachers and mentors, his reliance on a spirit of collaboration, his work with Kurt Elling and Robert Pinsky, and his impressions of the Jazz Cruise.