In his on-stage banter, the Chicago singer Kurt Elling can sound as if he's swallowed an instruction manual on the kind of cheery badinage the Fast Show's jazz critic would have relished. But the affectations only accentuate the impact of his dazzling hipness when he sings. Elling manages the remarkable double whammy of sounding as agile as an improvising instrumentalist (thus satisfying hardcore jazzers who don't like singers), yet intimately sensuous enough on the Great American Songbook to seduce a... read full article

A dazzling smorgasbord of scat, vocalese, poetry and stream of consciousness, Kurt Elling’s first ever residency at Ronnie Scott’s achieved immediate lift-off last night. Singer Elling’s quintet – long-time musical collaborator Laurence Hobgood (piano), Harish Raghavan (bass), John McLean (guitar) and Troy Miller (drums) – artfully mixed tempo, texture and temperature across two wide-ranging sets, from a swinging ‘Steppin’ Out’ and a lustrous ‘You Are Too Beautiful’ to a statuesque ‘My One and Only Love’ and revitalised ‘Nature Boy’, the... read full article

The jazz community in Chicago has always gravitated toward the Cubs, for one main reason: if your lifestyle demands that you work at night, you need a team that plays in the daytime. But this Friday, the jazz crowd has an extra incentive to attend the first game of the Crosstown Classic (Cubs v. Sox) at Wrigley Field: hometown GRAMMY®-winning vocalist Kurt Elling will sing the national anthem, as well as conduct the seventh-inning stretch rendition of “Take Me Out... read full article

Jazz singer Kurt Elling doesn't have to prep too much for Sunday night's performance at Davies Symphony Hall, where he joins the Count Basie Orchestra. They're revisiting the classic music Frank Sinatra made in the 1960s with the peerlessly swinging Basie band, much of it arranged by Quincy Jones. "That music is fully ingrained in my consciousness," says Elling, the Grammy-winning vocalist who counts Sinatra among the many musicians and poets who've fed his expansive art. "To sing these charts... read full article

When I last saw the Monterey Jazz Festival All-Stars, they were opening the 52nd MJF before a raucous Friday night crowd, the hour allotted to them not nearly enough to hold all their collective talents. Seven months later, in the more restrained environment of UCLA’s Royce Hall, I caught up with them again. Though the atmosphere is different, their current extended tour has given them the chance to explore the nuances of their interconnected skills, a prevailing theme at Friday’s... read full article

“Jazz musicians are improvisers, meaning that each jazz musician is thinking like a composer—only in real time, in collaboration with other musicians, in front of an audience,” says 2010 Grammy winner Kurt Elling ’89. The goal each night is to try to create beauty through combinations of notes one has never played before—and potentially no one has ever played before.” Ironically, Elling didn’t plan on becoming a jazz singer. He graduated from Gustavus with a history major and religion minor... read full article

At their best, jazz festivals gather a roster of international talent for a weekend of musicmaking, creating a crucible for collaborations between musicians who don’t normally play together. In this spirit, the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech hosted mainstays from California’s Monterey Jazz Festival Saturday night. As a touring group, they last stopped in Atlanta two years ago (at Symphony Hall) with a sextet featuring pianist Benny Green and saxophonist James Moody. It was a celebration of... read full article