Blog
Feb 17, 2012
Kurt Elling on the Grammys, confidence, the jazz lifestyle, his next album, and more
I've seen Kurt Elling perform countless times—seriously, so often I've lost track of the number—but I'd never interviewed him until Thursday, Feb 16, two days before his performance at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis On Saturday,...
Feb 14, 2012
Two Voices for Our Time: Kurt Elling and Lizz Wright at Orchestra Hall, February 18th
Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis hosts a double Valentine musical gala on Saturday, February 18th, with two of the hottest headliners in vocal music, Kurt Elling and Lizz Wright They perform back- to-back sets beginning at 8 pm, part of...
Feb 11, 2012
Jazz Singer Kurt Elling Plays Not My Job on NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”
PETER SAGAL, HOST: And now, the game where people who have done a lot of great things do something else Kurt Elling is often called the greatest male jazz singer alive But for many years, he was the Susan Lucci of jazz (SOUNDBITE OF...
Feb 10, 2012
Gustavus graduate Kurt Elling up for another Grammy
When the annual Grammy Awards are held on Sunday, February 12, Gustavus Alumnus Kurt Elling '89 will be among the nominees for Best Jazz Vocal Album for his latest jazz album entitled The Gate For Elling, this is his eleventh Grammy...
Dec 24, 2011
“What Is the Beautiful?” in Best Downtown Music of the Year – Vocal Edition
Beat poetry accompanied by jazz has a much-maligned reputation It seems terribly self-indulgent for someone to go up on a stage and say whatever and then some musicians play whatever and somehow insist that it's profoundly meaningful and if you...
Dec 23, 2011
Top 5 Jazz Vocal Performances Of 2011
How many ways can you sing a song Why do some pieces work only with certain vocalists Why is it so rare to have the right fit between a singer and a song Is it simply a matter of arrangement, or does the style and sensibility of a particular...
Dec 15, 2011
Kurt Elling thrills his audience in Blue Bell, PA
Kurt Elling thrilled the audience at this Pennsylvania college with his seemingly inexhaustible, four-octave baritone voice and dramatic songs that swept from one emotional high to another The show began with Elling and his rhythm...
Dec 14, 2011
What Is The Beautiful? — A celebratory Patchen tribute
The confluence of poetry or spoken word with improvisational music goes as far back as the Harlem renaissance, became synonymous with the Beats, figured heavily in proto-rap music (Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets) and continues to flourish...
Dec 02, 2011
The Jazz Genius of Kurt Elling
Vocalist Kurt Elling was in St Louis recently to perform at Jazz at the Bistro Arguably, he is one of the top jazz singers in the world today He was born in Chicago and raised in Rockford, Ill, where his father was the Choir Director of a...
Nov 20, 2011
Kurt Elling: Opening The Gate on the Next Phase of His Illustrious Vocal Career
Kurt Elling's creative and commercial impact in jazz over the past 15 years makes the following hard to fathom: thousands of fans throughout the world might have been deprived of one of the most celebrated voices of this generation had this...
Nov 10, 2011
Elling has helped reinvent jazz singing for modern times
Jazz singers were out of vogue for a while, perhaps because the focus on trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the young lions who emerged in his wake put the emphasis on instrumentals But in recent years, vocals have regained their place in the...
Nov 09, 2011
BBC Music Review: What Is The Beautiful? Vital, living art
In the 1950s, American poet Kenneth Patchen was a pioneer of poetry with a live jazz accompaniment, performing with Charles Mingus and others While some falsely aligned him with the Beats, Patchen remained an elusive and idiosyncratic artist up...