Jazz Articles about Kurt Elling

Meet Kurt Elling

by Craig Jolley
July 27, 2009

This interview was originally published in February 2000.Chicago music scene On my new recording [Kurt Elling Live in Chicago, Blue Note] I'm really proud to feature a lot of the musicians who have treated me well and who have taught me and who have been on the team with me from the get-go. Not only because of the debt of gratitude that I owe them, but also just because they're really beautiful musicians and deserve to be heard, ...

Kurt Elling: Recasting Brilliance

by Cicily Janus
July 27, 2009

When Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane recorded their one and only album together they created a moment that shaped the art of vocal jazz. An instant of beauty transformed into history. Despite a bias towards the original recording, after listening to Kurt Elling's lustrous and drawn butter version, it was clear the past could be silenced to make way for innovation. This is Elling's first recording since his hit, Night Moves (Blue Note), in 2007. To say that this album ...

Kurt Elling: Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman

by Andrew Velez
July 9, 2009

This is a live collection recorded as a part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series, a creative homage to the now classic 1963 John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman recording. For this occasion a jazz trio led by Laurence Hobgood, vocalist Kurt Elling's long-time musical partner, pianist and arranger is nestled into the tender brilliance of the string quartet ETHEL. One of the last great exponents of vocalese, Elling is no less a great singing storyteller. Early on ...

Kurt Elling: Dedicated To You

by A. Lienhard
June 20, 2009

Dedicated To You is a tribute to one of the most beloved and beautiful recordings in jazz, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. On that six song album, John Coltrane introduces a relatively unknown singer named Johnny Hartman. The two musicians had only just met one another, however in a mere three hours, they produce a classic. Hartman unfortunately never gains much recognition beyond this one album. Coltrane obviously fares a bit better. Kurt Elling is a standout ...

Laurence Hobgood / Charlie Haden / Kurt Elling: When The Heart Dances

by Chris May
May 20, 2009

Man, this is a beautiful album. How could it be otherwise? An intimate, unhurried conversation between Laurence Hobgood, since 1994 vocalist Kurt Elling's musical director, and one of the finest jazz pianists out there, and the magisterial Charlie Haden, featured bassist in bands led by saxophonist Ornette Coleman, pianist Keith Jarrett and guitarist Pat Metheny, among a truck load of other distinctions. The inimitable Elling guests on three tracks.

In his liner notes, describing the genesis of When ...

Kurt Elling: Nightmoves

by Samuel Chell
June 20, 2007

If the verbiage generated by a release is proportionate to its profitability, Kurt Elling must be firmly ensconced in the black. Nightmoves has already garnered volumes of ink (All Music Guide devotes three times more space to it than Miles Davis' Kind of Blue). Perhaps equally impressive testimony to Elling's eminence is that he can afford to take four years between albums and, like Sinatra in the 1950s, keep his Down Beat poll-winning streak as top male jazz vocalist intact. ...

Kurt Elling/Bill Charlap Live, Albany, N.Y.

by R.J. DeLuke
May 4, 2007

Kurt Elling with the Lawrence Hobgood Trio and the Bill Charlap Trio The Egg Albany, New York April 21, 2007

Kurt Elling is arguably the premier jazz singer on the scene today. Jazz musician may be a better label, since he's so much more than someone who steps in front of a microphone and provides vocals. No boy jazz singer, he.

He's released his first CD in four years (all of the others ...