Kurt Elling & Charlie Hunter: SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree

As Shakespeare said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter follow up their Grammy-nominated 2021 album, SuperBlue (Edition), with another sublime blend of jazz and groove. As on the first disc, jazz is represented by Elling, groove by Butcher Brown keyboardist DJ Harrison and drummer Corey Fonville. Hunter, who has had a foot in both camps for over two decades, acts as marriage broker.

Some jazz fans have an aversion to singers, for a whole lot of complicated but valid reasons—not least the tendency of all but the most inspired lyrics to drag even exalted instrumental music down from the heights and into prosaic literalism. But SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree should overcome most objections, and certainly that one. Elling's poetic excursions illuminate five of the nine tunes, and Joni Mitchell, Bob Dorough, Ron Sexsmith and Billy Collins (an actual card-carrying poet) are on hand for the rest.

Among the lyrics scribed by Elling is one for Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman." SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree's version follows hard on the heels of that on Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble's Spirit Gatherer: Tribute To Don Cherry (Spiritmuse, 2023). That featured Dwight Trible with a self-penned, effective but rudimentary lyric. Elling's words on "Only The Lonely Woman" are more ambitious, on a bigger canvas, a pin-sharp critique of male coercive behaviour towards women. (Summer 2023 is proving to be quite the time for Coleman's tune. ECM has just reissued Old And New Dreams' Old And New Dreams (1979) in its audiophile-vinyl Luminessence series, and the album contains an outstanding instrumental version of "Lonely Woman" by Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell).

"Only The Lonely Woman" is, perhaps, the album's masterpiece, but its mood is not characteristic of the overall disc. Aside from Sexsmith's lovelorn "Right About Now," which follows it, SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree is witty, uplifting and fun. And as hip as it gets. Don Was' deeply funky "Freeman Square" has a lyric (from which the album title is taken) co-written by Elling and Phil Galdston, and might be subtitled "Advice To A Young Hipster." It includes this observation: "Unless you're Miles Davis, there's always some brother, some other, smoother than you." Advice worth remembering when nighthawking. "Little Fairy Carpenter," tune by Hunter, words by Elling, is a suprachilled lullabye for grownups. Nate Smith's "Bounce It" is an irresistible piece of hip-hop infused street funk, one of several tracks fit to make the lame walk, maybe even dance. The closer, "The Afterlife," tune by Hunter, words by Billy Collins (from his poetry collection Questions About Angels) is the album's second masterpiece.

There are quirks, too. Among them Bob Dorough's "Naughty Number Nine," written for a project helping children learn arithmetic. Here it comes across as something between a spiel from a racing tipster, stoned numerology, and the beat-filling number crunching employed by certain rappers (as spoofed in Big Shaq's 2017 cut "Man's Not Hot," with its immortal line: "Two and two is four minus one that's three, quick maths." Check it out on YouTube).

Elling is on mic practically throughout the album, while Hunter, Harrison and Fonville attend to the grooves. There are short instrumental solos from flautist Elena Pinderhughes, on Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow," and breaks from trumpeter Jon Lampley, trombonist Chris Ott and saxophonist Dan White, on "Bounce It" and the group original "Not Here / Not Now."

It is tempting to give SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree five stars, but on the grounds that nothing is perfect, four-and-a-half will have to do. The album is magic.

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