Mar 01, 2005
Is there advice which you can give to the aspiring young Jazz singer?
Sing all the time Develop your instrument - your voice - over time through practice and performance Join a good choir and perform as much classical rep as you can Keep your eyes and ears open to what the instrumentalists do - both on and off...
Nov 01, 2004
Elling treats Da Camera audience to inventive vocals
Kurt Elling is a jazz singer whose approach is too cerebral to be constrained by that label Indeed, his inventive vocals - with traces of Jon Hendricks' scats and Al Jarreau's tone - challenge listeners to pay attention lest they fall behind as...
Aug 31, 2004
New format, Elling and Freeman get 7-night fest off to a hot start
Bigger, brawnier and brainier than it has been in more than a decade, the Chicago Jazz Festival roared back into action on Monday-launching a seven-night run not seen since the 1980s Though shrinking coffers forced the city to scale back the...
Jun 05, 2004
Bland new world:Watered-down jazz singers are being promoted as the real thing
They're young, glamorous, beautiful, talented, evocatively dressed, sumptuously photographed -- and, oh, so boring to hear Packaged to appeal more to the eye than to the ear, the new jazz singers -- or at least the vocalists being marketed as...
Jun 04, 2004
Ode to Walt Whitman strikingly experimental yet pleasingly conventional
CHARLESTON - Pianist Fred Hersch has a reputation for challenging and evocative projects But little can match the depth and profound power of his latest work, the musical recasting of "Leaves of Grass" With an ensemble of two brass, two reeds,...
Apr 16, 2004
Kurt Elling happy singing what he loves without pressure from mainstream music
The last time Kurt Elling appeared at the University of Northern Colorado/ Greeley Jazz Festival, he was treated like an OutKast The high school and college students screamed so loud when he was introduced it scared him They screamed as if he...
Dec 31, 2003
Kurt Elling: Spirit of the Monterey Jazz Festival
Great jazz draws on history while offering innovation Singer Kurt Elling embodied that spirit and then some this weekend at the 46th annual Monterey Jazz Festival, channeling predecessors of the art form and conjuring a vision of its...
Jul 30, 2003
CD Review of Man in the Air
Single-handedly, Kurt Elling has reinvigorated the art of vocalese, and popularized it, as no other singer, male or female, has in decades With unpredictability, intellect and a sense of adventure, Elling's treatments of songs that we think are...
Jul 24, 2003
Review: Man In The Air
Kurt Elling has finally delivered on the potential promised on his 1997 album The Messenger It is true that Elling has been terrifically consistent in his offerings with very inspired performances-- even if the material and its execution were...
Jul 22, 2003
Music Review of Man In The Air
There are two schools of thought on Kurt Elling Both sides tend to agree that Elling is a talented interpreter of songs in the jazz style, and that he possesses a certain skill when it comes to scat and to vocalese One side, however, laments...
Sep 30, 2001
Kurt Elling’s ‘LA/CHI/NY’ at Steppenwolf:Elling blends poetry, jazz in new work
Only a hard-swinging, head-tripping, scat-singing jazz poet such as Chicagoan Kurt Elling could have come up with it And only a theater company as fearless as Chicago's Steppenwolf would have dared to stage it Yet there it was, Monday night on...
Sep 30, 2001
Flirting with the mainstreamBrilliant jazz vocalist Kurt Elling plays it a little straighter
If the Chicago-based Kurt Elling has yet to find the kind of crossover audience that other vocalists have lucked into, perhaps it's because he's simply too hip Maybe this compelling ballad collection will put Elling over the top, but don't hold...