Kurt Elling: Manifesting the Music

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Kurt Elling first appeared on The Third Story podcast in 2016—nearly ten years ago now. In some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago. Back then, he had moved from his native Chicago to New York and was living in Manhattan. The first Trump presidency, the pandemic, and the cascade of upheaval that would follow were not yet realities.

Even then, Elling was already one of the most celebrated singers alive. This is what I wrote about him at the time:

Kurt Elling has been one of the most influential, respected, and popular jazz singers on the scene for decades. As the New York Times puts it, "Elling is the standout male vocalist of our time." The Washington Post agrees: "Since the mid-1990s, no singer in jazz has been as daring, dynamic, or interesting as Kurt Elling. With his soaring vocal flights, edgy lyrics, and sense of being on a musical mission, he has come to embody the creative spirit in jazz."

And yet, beneath all the praise, Kurt was keenly aware of, as he put it, "the work I haven't done yet."

That first conversation, recorded backstage at Birdland in New York (a club Kurt still considers a second home, and where he'll return in March for his annual residency), focused on his early years in Chicago, his deep musical relationships with Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks, and the essential partnership he shared with pianist Laurence Hobgood, who helped shape the sound of Elling's early recordings. What struck me most then was his gratitude and humility.

Elling has since moved back to Chicago, a city that has shaped him as deeply as he has come to represent it. It's hard to talk about Kurt without invoking the Chicago music community that nurtured him, and just as hard to talk about Chicago jazz without acknowledging Kurt as one of its great ambassadors.

But the formal occasion for our reunion conversation wasn't a new jazz record or a tour announcement. It was Broadway.

Kurt is currently in the midst of a six-month run appearing in Hadestown, playing the role of Hermes. Hadestown is a nontraditional musical: the band appears onstage, the music is rooted in folk, jazz, and blues, and the structure allows for strong, individual voices to shine.

In many ways, Hadestown feels like the perfect vehicle for Elling's Broadway debut. But more than that, Kurt seems almost purpose-built for the role of Hermes. Watching him perform, I found myself both suspending disbelief and feeling acutely aware that Kurt Elling himself was singing directly to me. Of course, Broadway is just one thread in a remarkably active decade.

During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Elling began experimenting long-distance with guitarist Charlie Hunter, alongside members of the band Butcher Brown. What started as an informal collaboration became SuperBlue, a soulful, slinky, funky, high-energy project that gave Kurt a chance, as he once told me backstage in Umbria, to "sing loud."

SuperBlue quickly grew into one of Elling's dominant creative outlets, yielding two full-length albums, three EPs, and countless performances and collaborations (including contributions from Third Story alumni like Nate Smith and Jon Lampley. (Hunter himself was also an early guest on the podcast.) The band will return to the road later this spring.

At the same time, or maybe in response to all that volume, Elling began releasing a series of more intimate recordings under the Wildflowers banner, pairing his voice with standout pianists in small-format settings. Wildflowers Vol. 1 features Sullivan Fortner; Vol. 2 pairs him with Joey Calderazzo; Vol. 3 with Christian Sands.

This impulse toward intimacy wasn't new. In 2020, Elling released Secrets Are the Best Stories, a striking collaboration with pianist Danilo Pérez. On that record, Elling set new lyrics to compositions by Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius—both members of the iconic fusion band Weather Report—continuing his long-standing interest in bridging jazz tradition with poetic reinterpretation.

It was only natural, then, that Elling would begin exploring the Weather Report catalog more directly in recent years, across the Wildflowers series, with his regular touring band, and in collaboration with another legendary fusion group, Yellowjackets.

Trying to summarize Kurt Elling's contribution in total is nearly impossible. He is a relentless traveler, a performer seemingly made for the stage, made to connect with an audience, made to entertain. At the same time, he is a deeply introspective and poetic thinker and writer. His work suggests that it's not only possible to be both hip and sensitive at the same time—it's important.

When we sat down together on the Upper West Side, where Kurt has been living during his Broadway run, our conversation moved fluidly between the stage and the street, between jazz clubs and civic life. He spoke candidly about depression, health, aging, and the long arc of finding gratitude—not as a platitude, but as a daily practice. He wrestled openly with politics, protest, leadership, and the moral responsibility of artists in a time marked by fear and fragmentation.

And throughout it all, he returned to a single idea that felt like the spine of the entire conversation: "I'm not here to perform. I'm here to manifest the music."

For Elling, the artist's job is not ego or display, but service. To channel the intention of the song, the lyric, the vibration itself, so that something healing can happen in the room. It's a conversation about jazz as an urban folk tradition, about lineage and humility, about bravery as a muscle that must be exercised. As Kurt put it, "Bravery does not mean you don't have fear. It's when you have fear and you act anyway."

This is not necessarily a light episode.

But it is a hopeful one.

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