Share the Ride as Kurt Elling Transverses the Compass of Human Experience

The Kurt Elling Holiday ShowBirdland, December 7-10Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter‘Superblue’ and ‘Superblue – The London Sessions (Live)’ (Edition Records)Kurt Elling is a jazz singer and frequent songwriter who is known for pushing the envelope of his art form, and not taking anything for granted. His music continually asks, “What is jazz?” “What is singing?” “What constitutes a song?” Mr. Elling, who turned 55 last month, is in the midst of a two-week run at Birdland, and between the shows on West 44th Street and his two recent releases, we’re getting at least three very different views of this unique artist.For the first week, which ended Saturday, Mr. Elling was in a duo setting with a marvelous Panamanian pianist, Danilo Perez. This week, he is starring in what is billed as the Kurt Elling Holiday Show. His “Superblue” — you might describe it as an album and a half — is a collaboration with a virtuoso guitarist, Charlie Hunter.It’s impossible to miss the diversity of these three projects: a rather avant-garde voice-and-piano duet, a very funky jam session that incorporates jazz with elements imported from rock and soul, and a Christmas album. Each of these breaks new ground in a very different fashion. To put it another way, they’re all pretty out there, and all pretty wonderful.At Birdland on Friday, Messrs. Elling and Perez explored the nature of song form. The description sounds sterile and academic, yet the music itself is anything but. Mr. Elling delivered a set of polemics, meditations, lyrics, and recitations that blurred the boundaries between song and speech. Mr. Perez, a pianist with a deep sense of harmony and a featherlight, porcelain touch, mostly followed his lead and provided sideline commentary, turning the monologue into a dialogue. Much of the text was profoundly abstract and yet never takes itself too seriously, i.e., a line about “flying kites from a basement window.” Speaking of holiday fare, some pieces were nested like turkenduck — a soliloquy within a poem, a speech within a song — yet each piece rose to a vivid emotional epiphany. It may seem ironic, but Mr. Elling couldn’t get away with so much talking if he weren’t so inherently musical; or so much non-linear storytelling if he weren’t a master of more conventional narratives. He framed the Friday show with the only two pieces of music the crowd was likely to know, concluding with a freely interpreted but highly moving treatment of Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed.”The “Superblue” project exists in two forms, the actual “Superblue” album released in 2021, in which he and Mr. Hunter conceived the music together and then recorded the 10 numbers in tandem, but remotely, in the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic. They followed it earlier this year with “Superblue — The London Sessions (Live),” in which Messrs. Elling and Hunter — now vaxxed to the max — convened in a studio along with keyboardist DJ Harrison, drummer Corey Fonville, and two backup singers, Vula Malinga and LaDonna Young, and turned out five tracks, mostly reprises from the album.The two releases are driven by catchy riffs and beats, and even without a bassist there’s no shortage of activity in the bass register, in that Mr. Harrison’s instrument corresponds to a B3 Hammond organ, which is essentially a keyboard and a bass at the same time, and Mr. Hunter’s custom-designed, seven-string “hybrid guitar” is effectively an electric guitar and an electric bass playing simultaneously. The original release includes “Dharma Bums,” which takes a tip from the Jack Kerouac novel and also quotes from “On the Road” in combining Eastern philosophy with Yankee chutzpah. The London release adds a beautiful reading of “Lonely Avenue,” the soulful dirge by Doc Pomus popularized by Ray Charles. My favorite, thankfully on both releases, is “Sassy,” by Janis Siegel and Cheryl Bentine of the Manhattan Transfer; it is an exuberant dedication to the great Sarah Vaughan.I would never try to predict what Mr. Elling is going to do next, but hopefully his “holiday show” this coming week will draw on his 2016 album, “The Beautiful Day: Kurt Elling Sings Christmas.” Knowing of his background in theology, it follows that this yuletide offering is more concerned with spirituality than elves and reindeer. It’s a transcendently beautiful and intensely stirring collection of highly uplifting numbers: “Little Drummer Boy” incorporates some Beatnik-isms (“brushes and sticks we’ll bring / to lay upon The King”) but makes it less flippant than reverent. “Some Children See Him,” is not a holiday pop song but truly a contemporary carol for our time. Mr. Elling intones it earnestly and full of devotion with guitarist John McLean and soprano saxophonist Jim Gailloreto. It’s as intensely personal a prayer as you ever will hear. Clearly, this is what Duke Ellington meant when he said, “Every man prays in his own language.” (In fact, If I could choose one project for Mr. Elling, it would be a collection of Ellington’s sacred songs and music.)Thus in different projects, Mr. Elling transverses the compass of human experience, from the intellectual to the carnal to the ecumenical. It should be stressed that everything he does, secular or otherwise, is rife with humor. Case in point: He began his Friday set with a whimsical, scatted romp through the chords of “Blue Skies” that also detoured into the bop standard “In Walked Bud.” I couldn’t help but picture Irving Berlin and Thelonious Monk sitting on a cloud together somewhere, looking down and laughing their fools heads off.

Share the Ride as Kurt Elling Transverses the Compass of Human Experience

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