Featured artist: KURT ELLING
[Kurt
Elling played the 2007 Montreal
Jazz Festival to the highest praises. Much of his material
came from his latest CD, Nightmoves. J. Hunter, who is
a frequent contributor to www.albanyjazz.com
and All About Jazz,
filed this report. ed.]
Everyone
deserves a fresh start. What’s more, everyone gets a fresh
start, every day: It’s called sunrise. That sounds like
a bad joke, but it’s true. Every day is a clean slate, if
we just commit ourselves to that concept. This theme of renewal
and redemption drives Nightmoves, Kurt Elling’s
first disc in four years.
Elling
is all about new beginnings nowadays; he’s taken on new
management, and he's making his Concord debut after a ten-year
relationship with Blue Note. Some things, fortunately, have not
changed: he’s still backed by the ever-sharp Laurence Hobgood
Trio -- though they are augmented by notable guest artists like
Christian McBride, Bob Mintzer and Howard Levy. Also, Elling is
still one of the great jazz interpreters of this generation; he's
not afraid to take risks in order to make his vision live.
Who
else would think of blending Keith Jarrett with Frank Sinatra,
or Irving Berlin with Antonio Carlos Jobim? Elling makes both
pairs without a qualm. “Leaving Again/In the Wee Small Hours”
is a nuanced picture of the everyday ‘heel.’ Through
Elling’s lyric to an untitled Jarrett improvisation, we
see a man sneaking out on a lover, unable to maintain any connection
beyond the physical; “In the Wee Small Hours” finds
the man in his own bed, alone, pining for the one that got away.
It takes all the fun out of ‘hooking up,’ but that’s
the point. Watching the woman you love with someone else is a
universal downer, and Elling flawlessly links Berlin’s pleading
“Change Partners” with the wistful Jobim bossa “If
You Never Come to Me” to give us two versions of the same
hell.
Elling
examines love -- both lost and found -- through the eyes of some
fascinating sources. He teams up with Hobgood trio bassist Rob
Amster on an improvised vocalese of the Theodore Roethke poem
“The Waking,” and then follows it with an expansion
on “The Sleepers,” part of Fred Hersch’s take
on Walt Whitman’s epic poem Leaves of Grass. Randy
Bachman wrote “Undun” about a girl who went into a
coma after dropping acid; in Elling’s hands, the girl is
at the tail end of a bad relationship choice, lost without the
love she thought was true.
With
moving versions of “Body and Soul” (appearing here
as “A New Body and Soul,” inspired by Dexter Gordon’s
1976 treatment) and Ellington’s “I Like the Sunrise,”
you can’t help but see Elling as the descendant of Sinatra
and Bennett. But the opening title track comes from Michael Franks,
a contemporary master who was always good for a smart lyric and
a vocal you couldn’t pin down. That sums up Kurt Elling
pretty well, too.
Elling
calls Nightmoves a soundtrack, but he won’t say
what it’s really about. I can tell you it’s not a
date movie, though it just might send you out of the theatre smiling
and -- above all -- hopeful.
