This guy …

No. Actu­ally, it’s this guy:

My first expe­ri­ence with Elling had, for rea­sons lost to the vagaries of mem­ory, to do with the com­bi­na­tion of a late Sat­ur­day night and the tele­vi­sion which, being bored, aim­less and soli­tary, I turned on. I stum­bled onto a broad­cast from the New­port Jazz Fes­ti­val on PBS, and saw that it was this singer I had heard about, Kurt Elling. There had already been some hype, as much as there can be in the jazz world, and I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal; the most recent big new jazz singer was Nora Jones, who doesn’t sing much and can’t sing jazz. So who was this guy?

The band launched into a bass-line vamp in the Dom­i­nant which resolved cooly and ele­gantly into the Tonic, and then Elling started to sing ‘Easy Liv­ing.’ I was hooked before he got to the end of the first phrase. It was imme­di­ately clear that he wasn’t just singing jazz, but that he was, and is, a jazz musi­cian. He was singing the song with the con­cep­tion of an instru­men­tal­ist, with the idea of how a horn could play the line and sort out the inter­vals; he sounded like a com­bi­na­tion Dex­ter Gor­don and Frank Sina­tra, man­ag­ing the feat of simul­ta­ne­ously keep­ing in time and stay­ing behind the beat, divid­ing the melody into short and long phrases and singing each one all the way through. And the singing chops; unerr­ing pitch, mas­ter­ful breath sup­port, the abil­ity to move his voice around and change tim­bre and color in the mid­dle of a phrase. Add to that an ele­gant, charm­ing and supremely con­fi­dent pres­ence, and I spent the next half-hour com­pletely thrilled and aston­ished. Then I ordered all this records (you can hear ‘Easy Liv­ing’ on the excep­tional “Flirt­ing With Twi­light”).

These records, all very good to extra­or­di­nary, estab­lish Elling as not only the great­est jazz singer of his gen­er­a­tion but the great­est singer in the world at the moment. It’s more than just the voice itself and his abil­ity to sing, which are unsur­passed in any genre, but the musi­cian­ship. There are plenty of good singers who are not good musi­cians, and the com­bi­na­tion of the two, rare (Placido Domingo is another), allows for musi­cal con­cep­tion and ambi­tion that go beyond just singing songs. While not super­fi­cially and avant-gardiste, Elling is a dar­ing musi­cian who seeks excep­tional chal­lenges and exceeds them. This comes through most clearly in his ded­i­ca­tion to vocalese, the art of recre­at­ing, with the voice, a pre­vi­ously recorded jazz instru­men­tal­ists solo, using lyrics cre­ated to fit the line and the music. The idea and style began in the be-bop era, arguably cre­ated by Eddie Jef­fer­son and King Plea­sure, and has remained as a tiny sub-speciality in the already sparsely pop­u­lated uni­verse of real jazz singers.

Vocalese singers are clas­si­cists and mod­ernists, they pre­serve the recorded past through mem­o­riza­tion and then trans­form and recon­tex­tu­al­ize it into ever-new expe­ri­ences. They are the jazz musician’s jazz singers, learn­ing their craft the way instru­men­tal­ists do, through prac­tic­ing and mas­ter­ing the solos of musi­cians they admire. Elling has embraced the tra­di­tion and added to it sub­stan­tially through his voice and his words. Since he can essen­tially sing any­thing, he’s free to choose music that appeals to him, no mat­ter how dif­fi­cult. He has vocal­ized a Char­lie Haden bass solo, ‘Moon­light Ser­e­nade,’ Coltrane’s solo from the ‘Res­o­lu­tion’ sec­tion of “A Love Supreme,” and a solo from Fred­die Hub­bard on ‘Freddie’s Yen For Jen,’ which is the great­est vocal per­for­mance I have ever heard. Elling writes his own lyrics, and they are as excep­tional as his singing; grounded in Rilke and Neruda, they are poetic, funny, intro­spec­tive and extro­verted. They con­sis­tently con­vey the singer’s per­sonal ques­tions, which include the­o­log­i­cal issues and med­i­ta­tions on the death of his brother, in a con­text that is always appro­pri­ate to the song itself. And he has gone even fur­ther afield. On “Live In Chicago,” you can hear him inter­po­late Saint John of the Cross’s ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ into ‘My Fool­ish Heart,’ and on his penul­ti­mate record he not only cre­ates vocalese set to music from Keith Jar­rett and Dex­ter Gor­don, he sets Roethke’s ‘The Wak­ing’ for voice accom­pa­nied by bass only. It’s exceptional.

Now we have a new Elling record, “Ded­i­cated To You,” which chan­nels his ambi­tions into a con­text that is less musi­cally dar­ing but his­tor­i­cally vital, a response to the pop­u­lar and quasi-classic “John Coltrane and Johnny Hart­man” record of 1963. It’s a live record, a con­cert given as part of Lin­coln Center’s Amer­i­can Song­book Series, and along with his usual group, the Lau­rence Hob­good Trio, adds the great Ernie Watts and Ethel String Quar­tet, with arrange­ments from Hob­good. Not as musi­cally dar­ing in the sense of show­ing just what can be done with the voice, and singing, but artis­ti­cally ambi­tious in mak­ing the past come alive and deliv­er­ing some­thing beautiful.

There is a dan­ger in jazz per­for­mances which seek to recre­ate pre­vi­ous jazz records or events. Jazz is the most in-the-moment music there is, music which works by mak­ing itself a-new and brand-new each time its per­formed. Using a foun­da­tion of musi­cal his­tory as the start­ing point to make new his­tory is an act that is rev­er­ent and irrev­er­ent at the same time, it acknowl­edges that debt to his­tory and then says, “here’s what I think of all that.” Too much rev­er­ence emas­cu­lates jazz, and mak­ing per­for­mances and records as museum pieces kills it. This is why the record­ing of Min­gus’ “Epi­taph,” despite its his­tor­i­cal and musi­co­log­i­cal impor­tance, fails. It slav­ishly seeks to fol­low what instruc­tion Min­gus left behind and ends up as a life­less descrip­tion of Min­gus’ work. Jazz is not clas­si­cal music, it lives in the musi­cians them­selves, not on the printed page. The score, the record­ing, is not Min­gus, only Min­gus is Min­gus. This is also the prob­lem with the Wyn­ton Marsalis historical-reverent approach at Lin­coln Cen­ter. Recre­at­ing past jazz, no mat­ter how impor­tant the music was, is not jazz, it is wor­ship. Jazz may have deep roots in the church, jazz wor­ship should be left to the fans. When musi­cians wor­ship jazz, they destroy it.

Remem­ber, don’t recre­ate, that’s the imper­a­tive. On a double-bill with Elling at Herbst The­ater in San Fran­cisco, Mark Mur­phy said, “what Kurt and I try to do is not recre­ate the past, but remem­ber it.” “Ded­i­cated To You” is an act of mem­ory, just as per­form­ing vocalese is, musi­cians con­tem­plat­ing their own recre­ation to music they know and love and offer­ing their response to it. It is a great suc­cess. The orig­i­nal could not bear the weight of too much rev­er­ence. “John Coltrane and Johnny Hart­man” is under­stand­ably cher­ished, it’s a lovely, relax­ing record, but no mas­ter­piece. Hart­man had a beau­ti­ful bari­tone, and sings the stan­dard mate­r­ial with sen­si­tiv­ity and skill, but the record is a lit­tle lugubri­ous, every­thing is per­formed as a bal­lad, Coltrane is con­sis­tently def­er­en­tial to the singer when a lit­tle sense of chal­lenge would be a wel­come contrast.

The con­struc­tively irrev­er­ent take on all this in “Ded­i­cated To You” begins with the fact that the record has more mate­r­ial than the touch­stone, adding stan­dards that Coltrane recorded else­where, like ‘Say It’ and ‘Nancy With The Laugh­ing Face,’ and begin­ning with ‘All Or Noth­ing At All’ in a quasi-rumba vamp. The band then plays Rodgers’ and Hart’s ‘It’s Easy To Remem­ber,’ while Elling deliv­ers a mono­logue which describes the cir­cum­stances of the first record, and con­cludes with the key phrase, “but we remem­ber, we’re jazz peo­ple.” Musi­cal mem­ory is as fun­gi­ble as cash, and so the per­for­mances of songs from the orig­i­nal are, with one excep­tion, com­pletely unlike their ear­lier ver­sions. The per­for­mance is more up-tempo all around, live­lier and fresher in atti­tude and lighter in tex­ture. The fea­tured roles of voice and sax­o­phone are reversed in inter­est­ing ways. Watts is the lush roman­tic, although he’s full of tem­pered fire as always, while Elling, with the search­ing force, focus and pleas­ing edge of his bari­tone, is a nat­ural in the Coltrane role (and clearly has learned a great deal about singing by lis­ten­ing to and learn­ing the play­ing of Coltrane, Gor­don and Wayne Shorter). The title track begins with del­i­cate pizzi­cato accom­pa­ni­ment in the strings, the flows into a lop­ing, double-time feel; ‘Autumn Ser­e­nade,’ which ends the Coltrane record, here is based on the rhyth­mic vamp of the orig­i­nal arrange­ment, but is much faster, opens with an effu­sive Watts solo, and has Elling mov­ing the lyric and the melody from dark­ness to light. ‘They Say It’s Won­der­ful’ is jaunty and hip here, the clos­ing ‘You Are Too Beau­ti­ful’ begins in con­tem­pla­tive reverie, then moves to a gen­tle swing which itself builds to a sweep­ing, soar­ing performance.

The track which will imme­di­ately draw the most inter­ested lis­ten­ers, of course, is ‘Lush Life.’ Billy Strayhorn’s bal­lad is per­haps the most excep­tional and unusual stan­dard there is, a lyri­cally and musi­cally com­plex long form bal­lad which moves through dif­fer­ent styles and nar­ra­tives. The song is fre­quently recorded and per­formed as a way for the musi­cian to demon­strate their musi­cal and emo­tional sophis­ti­ca­tion, but it is just as often under­stood. The com­plex­ity seems to invite a sort of grandios­ity, a ten­dency to indulge in large scale ges­tures, com­pletely wrong for a fun­da­men­tally intro­spec­tive song about abject roman­tic fail­ure; “I’ll live a lush life in some small dive/and there I’ll be/While I rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely too.” More than any­thing, it’s a bit­ter ode to defeat and alco­holism. Treat­ing it like a showy Broad­way tune, a way to bring atten­tion to the singer, as in this ver­sion from Queen Lat­i­fah, is anti­thet­i­cal to the song itself. In con­trast, Elling is mar­velously true. This is a song that requires real jazz singing, an empha­sis on inter­vals that a horn would play, rather than incre­men­tal move­ments up and down scales like most other vocal styles, and hear­ing a mas­ter like Elling limn melody and har­mony simul­ta­ne­ously is a deep plea­sure. He also treats the mer­cu­r­ial emo­tional con­tent of the lyrics with clar­ity and under­stand­ing, even the moments that express a ret­ro­spec­tive hope are tinged with regret. He opens up vocally in places, only to musi­cally and emo­tion­ally show how false that hope was. And to top it off, he pro­nounces dis­tin­gué perfectly.

Hob­good, Elling’s long­time musi­cal part­ner, arranges the music excep­tion­ally well. His writ­ing for and inte­gra­tion of the string quar­tet into a set of stan­dards is gen­er­ally seam­less and well-judged, the only moment where one is reminded of all the awk­ward attempts to shove clas­si­cal sounds into a jazz set­ting is a short soli sec­tion meant to fea­ture Ethel. Rather than a suc­cess­ful dis­play, it is just, unfor­tu­nately, awk­ward. Through­out the per­for­mance, though, Ethel pro­duces accom­pa­ni­ment that sounds per­fectly nat­ural and appro­pri­ate. Hobgood’s sub­tle power as an arranger is in re-harmonizing pas­sages of the songs, which he does both judi­ciously and to great effect. Hear­ing a pas­sage that seems both famil­iar and new is intrigu­ing to the ear, and it allows the musi­cians to place their own, new empha­sis on mate­r­ial that is more than famil­iar to the lis­tener. Each indi­vid­ual track has its own plea­sures, but the expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to ‘Ded­i­cated To You’ through, as a whole, is, as they say, won­der­ful in every way.