Kurt Elling: What Makes a Jazz Singer

Monday March 21, 2011

From JazzTimes

Kurt Elling: What Makes a Jazz Singer

By Nate Chinen
March 21, 2011

Kurt Elling probably wouldn’t be the first to say it, but he’s been on some fiendishly impressive sort of roll. “I can feel, especially in the past year and a half or so, that I’m finding a new spot,” he allows, no trace of bravado in his tone, one recent winter evening on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “And it’s making the music better. I’m finding a new spot as a human being, and I’m happy about that.”

We’re at Bistro Citron, a few blocks from the apartment where Elling now lives with his wife, Jennifer, and their 5-year-old daughter, Luiza. He has in fact just come from one of Luiza’s school performances down the street. A Chicago native, he moved with his family to New York City several years ago, to test out a longtime “what if?” and flesh out, as he puts it, “a map inside my head.” It’s probably an accident of timing, but his tenure in the Big Apple has overlapped with an extremely blessed stretch of his career.

Last year, Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman finally earned Elling his first Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album. (He had been nominated for each of his previous eight.) In the 2010 JazzTimes Readers’ Poll, he was pronounced Best Male Vocalist for the sixth time; he earned the same honor in last issue’s inaugural Expanded Critics’ Poll. In that other big mainstream jazz magazine, critics voted him Male Vocalist of the Year for the 11th year in a row. Looking back to late 2009, there was his performance at the first State dinner hosted by Barack and Michelle Obama, with whom he has been acquainted for a while. (Six years ago he bought their condo on the south side of Chicago. “His book sales were taking off,” Elling says of the president, a state senator at the time, “and he was ready to have a mansion. And I was ready for laundry in-unit.”)

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