Kurt Elling Live @ J&R - WBGO’s Mid-Day Jazz

Mid-Day Jazz Live @ J&R remote WBGO broadcast brought Kurt Elling to J&R’s Jazz Store, Tuesday, April 17, 2007 where he performed six songs from his latest album Nightmoves.

RNYK was permitted to video the third and fourth songs of the six song set. In this first of our two videos, Kurt puts his distinctive stamp on a soulful version of The Guess Who’s 1969 pop hit “Undun”, inviting Bob Mintzer to take a turn on tenor sax.

Between songs, WBGO’s Rhonda Hamilton asked a few on-air questions of Kurt, who readily revealed that his passion for music and lyrics came from his father, who was a church musician. “I came up in a heightened atmosphere of both music and the use of the word …

“I started singing out of joy before I realized I was experiencing joy. Because it was there all the time, choirs were happening all the time and I jumped right in. It was an experience that was so utterly natural that I had logged a number of years before I realized, ‘Hey, Wow! I’m actually a choir person!’ or ‘I’m actually a singer!’…

“Because of that I had a heightened experience of the use of words to move people and heighten their experience, to provide them with an feeling of exhilaration and empowerment. As a jazz singer, not as a jazz instrumentalist, it is up to me to be very conscious of the words I’m singing along with the music. Because the music is going to always be so powerful for people, the vibrations go out, the harmonics, the way it resonates in the body, through the ear into the brain, into the soul. So, I’m always very conscious, very aware of the what the message is of a specific song …

“There’s always pain in the world, there’s always suffering, especially the way things are these days, I pay particular attention to remind people of our noble possibilities as human beings …

“I don’t have to preach to people for that to happen, it just happens because the music goes that way.”

In our video of the set’s fourth song, “Where Are You” is a vocalese number written by Elling based on Dexter Gordon’s recording of the piece for his 1962 Blue Note recording, Go.