Tag: editionrecords

Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter, SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree

Album of the Week, August 17, 2024

Sometimes a jazz record is as deep as the ocean, and sometimes it’s just fun. And sometimes, it can be deeply fun! Such has been the case with the music Kurt Elling has been releasing under the “SuperBlue” moniker. Started as a pandemic project, an initially virtual collaboration between Elling and Charlie Hunter, with DJ Harrison and Corey Fonville, the project appears to have taken on a life of its own and has seen a few releases. This week, as we (for now) wrap up this summer of jazz vocal music, we check in on the most recent release, 2023’s The Iridescent Spree.

Just because the music is fun doesn’t mean it has to be shallow. “Black Crow,” a cover of a Joni Mitchell tune from her 1976 album Hejira, definitely proves the point. Mitchell had increasingly moved in a jazz direction during the 1970s, and this cover returns the favor, reconfiguring the intense heat of the original into a cooler burbling groove. This is not Elling diving deeply into the psychodrama of a song; here he joyfully scats over the last verse until it abruptly ends, transitioning into “Freeman Square,” a Don Was tune with lyrics by Elling. If there’s a thesis statement for the album, it might be the closing chorus: “Unless you’re Miles Davis there’s always some brother / Some mother smoother than you./So don’t you worry ‘bout a thing. You’ve got plenty of bells to ring/Bring that bad thing you bring & swing on down to Freeman Square.” Elling swings hard here but it sounds effortlessly cool.

“Naughty Number Nine” might be familiar to aficionados of both composer Bob Dorough and Schoolhouse Rock—the original version can be watched on YouTube and is also part of the Multiplication Rock album. Here it’s a slightly boozy blues in 6 with a killer horn section and a hipper than hip vocal from Elling, echoing the brilliant original from drummer Grady Tate.

“Little Fairy Carpenter,” one of the full originals on the record, is a slow moving ballad that lets Elling stretch out a bit. “Finally life is hanging by a thread… the hourglass sands have run through your hands… your deadline calls you to fold or expand,” Elling’s narrator sings, returning to the carpe diem theme of earlier originals. The difference here is the brilliant harmony that Elling overdubs onto those chorus vocals, and the overall laid-back vibe that gives one the impression that he’s not just musically inclined but reclined (to steal a gag from an old Scooby Doo episode).

The side ends on an upbeat note. “Bounce It” made its debut as an instrumental track on the SuperBlue: Guilty Pleasures EP that accompanied the limited edition version of this record; this version adds lyrics and a certain cockeyed velocity to the seriously funky backing track (complete with horns).

“Only the Lonely Woman” invokes Ornette Coleman’s most famous ballad, with a sympathetic vocalese written by Elling atop skittering drums and atmospheric keys. “She’s just a lonely woman, hollowed out in despair,” he sings of an imagined woman in the throes of anguish; Coleman’s music, a show-stopping melody in any rendition, is the real star here.

“Right About Now,” a Ron Sexsmith tune from his 1999 album Whereabouts, is a faithful cover down to tempo and spareness of accompaniment; the original, as with many of Sexsmith’s tunes, needed little dressing up. This is blue-eyed soul, or at least blue-eyed R&B, at its most achingly desperate, and Elling does it justice.

“Not Here / Not Now” is a regretfully funky “no thank you,” as Elling informs a prospective partner that “though it’s clear / that we are smashing in a parallel sphere… there’s a price we’d pay for desire / so with regret / I’d better leave you with a quick goombye.” It’s less of a diss than “Can’t Make It With Your Mind” from SuperBlue, but it’s a “no thank you” nonetheless.

“The Afterlife” closes the album with a spoken word moment, as Elling narrates Billy Collins’ 1990 poem over a deeply funky groove. Elling returns here again to the subject of mortality and the regret that comes too late: “They wish they could wake in the morning like you/and stand at a window examining the winter trees…” But again, the main thing here is the groove, not the dead, and the song closes the album in this downtempo contemplation of the eternal.

Elling possesses a smoky voice, a deep groove and a voracious intellect, and sometimes his records lead more toward one of those three poles. In The Iridescent Spree, we get something approaching a balance, and a funky one, as we think about mortality even as the band has us chair-dancing. We may lean more into this balance between wit and rhythm in the not too far distant future; what is certain is that next week will be completely different.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

P.S. Here’s the bonus EP, Guilty Pleasures, which I recommend listening to with your mind wide open and your smile wider.

Kurt Elling, SuperBlue

Album of the Week, July 27, 2024

After winning his second Grammy award for Secrets are the Best Stories, what did Kurt Elling do? He could easily have repeated the formula or continued collaborating with Danilo Pérez. He could’ve made another album with Branford Marsalis. He could’ve even taken some time off. Instead—in the depths of the pandemic—he made a sharp left turn into a completely different sound.

SuperBlue has some similarities to Elling’s earlier albums. There are sharp lyrics in his vocalese. There’s a top notch band—though its composition is markedly different than what went before. There’s also genius adaptations of unadaptable instrumental jazz tunes into singable melodies, in this case an astonishing cover of a late Wayne Shorter tune.

But those differences… The biggest is the presence of guitarist Charlie Hunter. Hunter’s an innovator not just in guitar technique but in the design of the instrument. He began his career playing seven-string guitar in the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy; the custom-built instrument allowed him to provide both guitar and bass lines simultaneously, a trick he also used on his Blue Note Records debut in 1995 (this time on an eight-string guitar). Add drummer Corey Fonville, who has collaborated with traditional New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Peyton and genre bender Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and Richmond, VA based keyboard player and producer DJ Harrison, and you have a very different foundation for a Kurt Elling album. Think less jazz contemplation and more jazz-funk.

But the band didn’t get together in the studio; due to COVID-19, they initially exchanged tracks and ideas online, building the basic tracks asynchronously; eventually Elling and Hunter met up in a barn in Illinois to add vocals and guitar. You can’t tell; the band sounds tight and funky throughout from the first notes of “SuperBlue,” as they give an out of time introduction before they drop into the funky pocket and Elling intones “The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the world with fresh eyes” (quoting Marat/Sade). Makes a pretty good manifesto for the experiment!

“Sassy” is a recasting of Manhattan Transfer’s tribute to Sarah Vaughan from their 1991 album The Offbeat of Avenues, and both Elling’s upper range and his inner beatnik poet get a workout. There’s some great Fender Rhodes work from Harrison here too. The Fender shows up on the next track too, the original “Manic Panic Epiphanic,” and it’s a great funky ballad that interpolates falsetto choruses and “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” The statement of hope at the core of the song is striking even before you realize that it was written in the darkest days of the pandemic.

Elling doesn’t abandon his bag of tricks, and he goes to the vocalese well for “Where To Find It,” improbably written atop Wayne Shorter’s Grammy-winning “Aung San Suu Kyi.” Hunter finds the groove in the underbelly of Shorter’s tune, and he and Fonville stay in the engine room, stoking the fires from the pocket. Meanwhile Elling’s lyrics veer from the philosophical to the poetic to the downright Buddhist: “The snowfall tracks speak to one other… Find it in becoming/drumming like a running wind horse carrying your foreshadowing…”

“Can’t Make It With Your Mind” veers into a different lane, with Elling delivering a fast-paced diss track to an attractive woman in a bar who immediately turns off the narrator when she reveals she’s a Q-Anon true believer: “I wish you’d kept it on the physical plane/‘Cause I can’t make it with your brain.” Elling follows up the story with a series of imagined tabloid headlines, underscoring the looney tunes credulity of the conspiracy theorist.

Cody Chesnutt’s “The Seed” would seem an odd choice for an ordinary jazz musician, but it’s right up this band’s alley. The SuperBlue version feels like an old school soul number with a little extra abrasive guitar for color. The original tune “Dharma Bums” brings the beatnik back, with a hefty dose of Kerouac mixed in alongside some straight up silliness. “Cause when the night falls & stars shed their sparkler dims & don’t you know that God is Pooh-Bear
holding out his honeyed paws to both of us from way out there?” Well, no, I didn’t know that, actually.

“Circus” provides a new soundtrack for the Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan short story from his 2004 album Real Gone. Elling narrates the story with a straight face, despite the references to “Horse Faced Ethel” and “One Eyed Myra.” The backing track is a frantic funk groove fueled by Hunter’s guitar and Fonville’s kit, and the band sounds like they could stay there all day.

The mood shifts for “Endless Lawns,” a reworking of an earlier Elling song (based on a Carla Bley tune from her 1987 album Sextet) from his 2018 album The Questions. There’s more funk and grit in this version, and a hefty shot more swing too—and an interpolation of Judith Minty’s poem “Sailing by Stars.” It sounds like an overloaded mess, but it all fits together thanks to the band’s delicate touch and Elling’s soulful delivery. “This Is How We Do,” the closing track, feels a bit like a band theme, an endless loop of a motto. It’s fit for purpose, and you can imagine the band closing out a set in a club with it.

Throughout SuperBlue, Elling sounds like he’s having a blast, as though he’s floating free from the weighty concerns of his last few albums. That might be why he didn’t zag after this zig; he kept working with the SuperBlue group, as we’ll hear in a few weeks. Next week, though, we’ll check in with Cécile McLorin Salvant and see how she spent the pandemic.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Kurt Elling, Secrets are the Best Stories

Album of the Week, July 20, 2024

Kurt Elling was stretching out. The jazz singer had started his career with a bang, signing with Blue Note in the early 1990s and recording a string of Grammy nominated albums (winning for 2009’s Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman) that were informed by a unique combination of dramatic sense, beat poetry, and vocalese — taking compositions without words and scatting or even writing new lyrics for them. This formula worked across six albums for Blue Note and five for Concord Records from 1995 to 2015.

But by the end of that period the singer was starting to show signs of restlessness. He parted ways with pianist and arranger Laurence Hobgood, who had been with him from the first Blue Note album. He collaborated with saxophonist Branford Marsalis and his quartet, recording the album The Upward Spiral, and with pianist Brad Mehldau, appearing on his album Finding Gabriel. And he changed labels again, to UK independent Edition Records. Secrets are the Best Stories, recorded with pianist Danilo Pérez (known for his long collaboration with Wayne Shorter), alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, bassist Clark Sommers, drummer Johnathan Blake, guitarist Chico Pinheiro, and percussionists Rogerio Boccato and Román Diaz.

Secrets are the Best Stories opens with the first three songs written over existing jazz tunes by Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter. “The Fanfold Hawk” is dedicated to poet Franz Wright, and Elling adapts parts of Wright’s poem “The Hawk” for the lyric, imaging abandoning the “crazed, incessant sounds” that drive us toward, as the poet writes, “what makes me sick, and not/what makes me glad.” The song is performed with minimal accompaniment by Sommers, with Elling navigating the thorny vocal line above Sommers’ countermelody. The poem transitions seamlessly into “A Certain Continuum,” also based on a Pastorius melody, his “Continuum” from his first album. Elling’s lyrics capture the mystery of the ever changing world as well as the mysteries of life. The fuller band arrangement here gives us the first of Danilo Pérez’s improvisational moments in a brilliant solo.

“Stays” is a full-on story, set to Wayne Shorter’s “Go” from his seminal 1960s album Schizophrenia. Elling sets the story of a mysterious upstairs neighbor with a secret past to Shorter’s twisting saxophone line, but Pérez’s arrangement strips back the chordal complexity of Shorter’s original sextet to the bare minimum of the piano trio. “Go,” as I wrote in 2022, is a subtle melody that “sneaks under the blankets of your mind”; here the melody is put to good service in delivering the story of a man haunted by ghosts.

“Gratitude (for Robert Bly)” adapts and continues the story in the poet’s “Visiting Sand Island,” shaping a tale of a man who thinks himself unlucky despite his poetic gifts. Pérez and Sommers exchange salsa patterns above a gentle 6/8 sussuration from the drums and percussionists. This leads into “Stage I,” composed by Django Bates with lyrics by Sidsel Endresen from the latter’s 1994 ECM album Exiles. The song creates a sense of disassociation and exploration of self around a series of similes: “Like being in a story/like starring in a play/acting out some destiny/far, far away from anywhere… Like watching people watching you/Like hanging out in No Town/Like you knew the lingo/ Like flying kites from a basement window.” It’s deeply moving in a tentative, delicate sort of way.

This leads into “Beloved (For Toni Morrison).” Elling tells a story of the inhumanity of the chattel slavery system in the pre-Civil War American South. Drawing on an 1857 poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” he illustrates the dilemma of slavery with the story of a mother who fails to protect all her children as they try to escape their captors. While marginally more hopeful than his source material (in the original poem, the mother kills her own children rather than let them be returned to slavery), it’s still a dark tale with no happy endings, albeit beautifully sung. The concluding movements, “Stages II, III,” of the Bates and Endresen poem frame the tale with a ghostly story of a narrator who has disappeared from her own life.

“Song of the Rio Grande (for Oscar and Valeria Martinez-Ramirez)” is a companion to “Beloved,” telling the story of the 2019 drowning death of Oscar Ramirez and his daughter Valeria as they sought to cross the Rio Grande after despairing of legally immigrating to the United States. It’s a mournful song, but coldly precise after the churning emotion of “Beloved.” He follows this with Silvio Rodriguez’s “Rabo de Nube”; sung in the original Spanish, he wishes for a whirlwind to sweep everything away, to remove the sadness and provide revenge.

“Esperanto” switches gears back to the power of hope. Singing over a Vince Mendoza melody, Elling calls out the power of letting one’s own actions and existence be sufficient to protect against the horrors of the world: “It’s a hope / a sign / a measure of quiet rapture / of love and what might come after
It’s letting go / and letting no answer be an answer.” The album closes with Pérez’s quiet “Epilogo,” which ends on a unresolved suspension as if to say: who can tell how things will end?

Secrets are the Best Stories is that rare jazz vocal album, an easy surface listen that reveals deeper layers the more you listen. Little wonder it won a Grammy for best jazz vocal album in 2021; Elling’s deep heart and challenging social vision, along with his mind-boggling ability to invest impossible melodies with ease and grace, created something deeply powerful here. He would change gears again with his next album, a collaboration that took him in a very different direction; we’ll hear that next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here: