Kurt Elling: Jazz Royalty

Saturday February 18, 2012

From MinnPost

Kurt Elling: ‘Any music that jazz encounters, it absorbs and transforms’
By: Pamela Espeland

JazzTimes magazine once outlined a “royal bloodline of male jazz singers.” Here’s how it goes: from Louis Armstrong to Mel Tormé to Jon Hendricks to Mark Murphy to Kurt Elling.

Elling will perform at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis on Saturday, Feb. 18. The preeminent male jazz singer of our time, he is internationally known, praised and applauded. In 2011, he performed 138 shows in 74 cities in 24 countries. His baritone voice famously spans four octaves, and he knows how to use it, singing standards and vocalese (his own lyrics to improvised instrumental solos), scatting, quoting poetry, bending notes, hitting stratospheric highs, and (more recently) singing in multiple languages.

All nine of his CDs have earned Grammy nominations; he won Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2010 for “Dedicated to You.” His latest, “The Gate,” didn’t win the Grammy but did take the Edison Jazz/World Award for Vocal Jazz, the Netherlands’ equivalent. He routinely tops the DownBeat and JazzTimes readers’ polls for male vocalist of the year.

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