Courtesy of Kurt Elling







Blue Note Records

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH KURT ELLING


I am not a fan of vocalists. Frank Sinatra is an icon in my home. After all, my baby sister did name her dog in honor of the man. Ella, well, who doesn't love Ella? But outside of Tony Bennett, who last I saw him was getting up there in age, there are not many male jazz singers I am all that thrilled about. But Kurt Elling has brass, featuring some of Chicago's heavies for his latest Blue Note recording. And I will entertain any artist who is willing to put it out there in the wind. Elling may be one of the bright hopes for what I deem as a lost art form. If male jazz singers are not to become a distant memory and subjects of A&E's Biography specials, more people like Elling need to be bringing their own unique brand of crooning to the masses. So take a chair and enjoy this candid conversation with Elling, as always, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

KURT ELLING: My father was a church musician and so I always had music around and it was always available to me, although it was most straight music, Brahms, Bach. I listened to pop music and stuff like that when I was coming up. When I started listening to music actively rather than passively, it was just around the time when I was in college. There were some guys down the hall from me who were playing Dave Brubeck and Herbie Hancock and cats like that and I started to get really turned onto it, although I had heard some little bits of jazz before, but not as an active listener. As soon as I started to listen to it actively, I was also given a chance to start sitting in with different groups on campus and really fell into love with the thing just as a joyful hobby sort of thing. I came back to Chicago to go to graduate school and I was studying the philosophy of religion at the University of Chicago's Divinity School and sitting in in clubs all the time and over about a three year period, I realized that my fun and the joy of my life was happening a lot more in clubs with jazz musicians than it was in the classroom with academic people. I sort of figured out that I had a chance of doing this kind of thing and decided to take my shot at it and started to work in earnest toward becoming a jazz musician.


FJ: Your approach is very unique in an aspect of music where difference is frowned upon and singing standards and songbooks are the norm.

KURT ELLING: Well, it is always difficult to start out. I was given a lot of blessings because a lot of musicians on the scene were very generous with stage time and were always willing to encourage me and help me out. It was definitely up to me to get money gigs. I did a lot of people's weddings for a number of years to supplement and to get stage experience. I had to do the hustle for sure and that meant spending the money that it took to get out of the house and go club to club and make up my own press kit and just hustle up the work.


FJ: If people come to your shows looking for a rendition of "My Way," they are in for a surprise.

KURT ELLING: Well, in jazz, the way it exists is for every performer to find his own voice and to speak what he really thinks and play the notes that he feels sounds good, and so it would be apathetical of the music for me to do anything other than what I really hear. I could probably make a lot more money playing what other people have already played and they've already done the work to make that popular, Frank Sinatra or Harry Connick or something like that. I think the truest respect that you can pay to the music of somebody who is a great artist like Frank Sinatra, or Betty Carter, or Jon Hendricks, is to try to figure out your own thing and to build on what they've done and to learn from them, but more importantly, to become yourself and to have your own thing to say and to be an artist in your own right.


FJ: It would have been easier being a college professor, any regrets?

KURT ELLING: No, not at all.


FJ: Are you a risk taker?

KURT ELLING: Yeah (laughing), absolutely. This whole thing is one big risk.


FJ: You have a tendency to improvise lyrics as you go along. There is pressure that comes with that approach, especially in a live setting, to continue that constant flow of ideas.

KURT ELLING: Well, I do when I get tapped out. Sure, I get tapped out. It is more mental fatigue though, than it is not knowing where to look. I work a lot these days and really, my style of writing is more like live like a monk and just be in the music and be in books and have it go from there. I don't know any other way to work and so that does make it a little bit difficult. If you are on the road all the time and you're married and you're trying to make records and you're trying to produce and you're trying to all these other things, it is definitely apathetical.


FJ: How much time do you spend on the road?

KURT ELLING: Probably six months out of the year.


FJ: What is the most difficult aspect of life on the road?

KURT ELLING: Probably the hotels and airplanes and having to deal with all of that. A lot of people say, "Wow, I can't believe you get paid. All you've got to do is be up there for two hours and play and have fun." Well, expect that a lot of what we're getting paid for is to be away from home, to have to sit in airports for six and a half hours in a day, and fly around and eat terrible airplane food and stay in a crappy hotel and just all the things that go into being on the road, the fatigue, and trying to be an artist under duress like this, that is what we are getting paid for, is to put up with everything it takes to have those two hours on stage.


FJ: I think people have this misconception that you have a nice grand home or hotel room and you are chauffeured to your gig.

KURT ELLING: (Laughing) No, that doesn't happen.


FJ: Let's touch on your Blue Note debut, Close Your Eyes.

KURT ELLING: I am very proud of it. I feel like there is a lot of stuff in there that really surpassed my actual abilities. There are other things that I would have liked to change about it, but it is an honest record. It is really where I was at the time. Just like all of my records, I just try to have my records be honest reflections of what material I'm working with and what ideas that I have and try to have it represented as well as I can what I am actually able to do at the time and what I really want to communicate.


FJ: You are a superb performer live, is it difficult to translate that live energy onto a studio record?

KURT ELLING: Thank you, but well, a studio record is a lot different experience than performing in front of people live. In the studio, you microscope your work and you are playing to make the music as exciting and as beautiful as you can make it. You are thinking about an eventual audience, but you are playing more for yourself, for the sake of the music, and for the other musicians. Whereas in a live setting, you are there to entertain a lot more. You are there to make a live, electric kind of connection with the audience. And they really become a member of the band and they direct a lot of the ways that stuff goes. There is definitely a difference.


FJ: You get the difficult aspects of both worlds with your latest Blue Note release, Live in Chicago.

KURT ELLING: There are different kinds of stress. I think that working live, you throw a lot more to the wind. You are playing and you can relax in a certain kind of a way because as long as you can make a connection with the people, everything is mellow. There are a lot of other kinds of concerns that you have to deal with as a producer going into that situation. You have to worry about, well, here you are performing in your hometown, who don't you put on the guest list? That kind of thing is just tragic for me. How many nights are you going to do it? Are you going to charge a cover or are you just going to invite everyone for free? How do you work it so everybody feels like it is the right way? It is your hometown and you just want everybody to feel like they are included. It didn't take as much time as a studio record because a lot of the things that we put on the live record are things we were already performing live. The most difficult parts for me were the logistical aspects. I wanted to make sure that Jon Hendricks was comfortable and so we had to get good seats for him on the plane and we had to get a good limo to bring him. We had to make sure it was cool because here is a guy that is a pretty old dude and is a master of the art. You really need to make sure that he is honored and treated right. I also wanted to treat Von Freeman right. The guest list thing and which nights we were going to do it on and then we had TV cameras there and just all sorts of stuff that was sort of in the way of the music. That was really the most difficult part. The team that we had working on the gig were all exceptional. Everybody gave a lot more than they got paid for. Everybody's heart was in it the right way. It is a real gift to have that kind of culture surrounding you.


FJ: In regards to your art, you refer to it as playing, not singing. Do you consider yourself a jazz musician as opposed to a jazz singer?

KURT ELLING: I think so. I really can't make any other kinds of choices. This is the stuff that interests me. This is the stuff that makes a viable artistic, theatrical, musical event and I really want people to have something that knocks them out. That is what has really drawn me to get out of the house instead of watching TV, to think that you're going to see something. You're not going to see nothing. You're going to be there when such and such happens. I want people to say, "You should have been there. You wouldn't believe what happened. You should have heard this." That is the reason people come out and I don't ever want them to be disappointed.


FJ: It is poetic, what you do.

KURT ELLING: I hope it comes off that way. It's a lot of hard work.


FJ: As an Angeles native, I have a very superficial knowledge of Chicago. What are some aspects of the Windy City that West Coasters like me would never realize at a glance?

KURT ELLING: How the city sounds. It seeps into the way the music is played. It definitely affects the way artists are developed. There is a tradition called the tough tenor tradition that comes out of Chicago. It is cats who play the tenor saxophone who came up like Gene Ammons and Von Freeman and Johnny Griffin. Cats with a really burly, gritty approach to the way the tenor is played, really masculine and visceral. That is definitely a reflection of the way the city feels and the rhythm of the city and how hard working it is. All the cultures colliding, but still having a basic, Chicago is really the most American of large cities. New York is a cosmopolitan metropolis of its own and Los Angeles is Los Angeles. Nothing like LA, but Chicago really is an American city and I really feel that you get that feeling when you are there. It belongs to America and it feels like this is really America.


FJ: A very blue-collar town.

KURT ELLING: It is a very blue-collar town. Chicago always reminds me of a Polish washerwoman with a bandana and she has just got the mop and she is going to scrub the floors on her knees. That is really the way Chicago is. It is a blues town. It is a hard drinking town. It is a gritty town and it is also a town of magnificent culture and art. It is one of the architectural marvels of the world. You can actually see all the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. You can see them because they are not crowded in by a bunch of other buildings.


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and anchors the six o'clock news. Comments?  Email Fred.