On November 2, 1967, Kurt Elling was born. Elling is a jazz singer and lyricist who has become one of the best contemporary practitioners of vocalese, the art of writing lyrics to previously recorded instrumental solos.
Elling was born in Chicago and grew up not far away, in Rockford, Illinois. His father was the music director of a Lutheran church, and Elling was educated at private Lutheran schools. His childhood musical instruction was fairly standard; he sang in the school choir and played a few different instruments.
Elling didn’t discover jazz until he was a student at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, where he majored in history and minored in religion. In 1989, he entered the divinity school at the University of Chicago, studying for a master’s degree in philosophy of religion, and considering an academic career.
It was while he was living in Chicago that he began singing weekly at a small jazz club. He wasn’t paid much, but the club’s pianist became an important teacher and mentor. He found himself torn between his studies and music. "By day I was reading Kant and Schleiermacher, trying to get a handle on that, and at night I was sitting-in in clubs, and, of course, you can't do both and be effective,” he later said. “Eventually Saturday night won out over Sunday morning." Elling left the University of Chicago in 1992, only one credit short of his master’s degree.
For the next few years, Elling worked a variety of jobs—mover, wedding singer—in addition to his club gigs. He has listed singer Mark Murphy, known for his skill at improvisation and vocalese, and singer/trumpeter Chet Baker as important early influences.
In 1995, Elling recorded a demo tape, which eventually made its way to Blue Note Records; they signed him and released Close Your Eyes later that year. The album received glowing praise; one critic called it “as auspicious a jazz vocal debut as the world has heard.” The music industry agreed, and the album was nominated for a Grammy Award, as were all of Elling’s first ten albums.
The 1997 album The Messenger found Elling starting to stretch out a bit from jazz standards with a version of The Zombies’ “Time of the Season,” and doing an impressive vocalese to what had originally been a Dexter Gordon saxophone solo on “Tanya Jean.”
Blue Note asked Elling for “something more on the romantic side” for his next album, and This Time It’s Love featured fewer of Elling’s original songs, leaning instead towards classic romantic ballads. By contrast, 2003’s Man in the Air was mostly vocalese, with Elling adding lyrics to music by Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, and John Coltrane, with an unexpected cover of The Association’s “Never My Love” added to the mix.
Elling’s next project was a collaboration with pianist Fred Hersch; he was one of the two singers for Hersch’s Leaves of Grass, a jazz song cycle based on poems by Walt Whitman. Elling included one of Hersch’s Whitman songs, this time performed by his own trio, on his next album, Nightmoves, which also included an original setting of a poem by Theodore Roethke.
After several nominations, Elling finally won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Album for 2009’s Dedicated to You, a tribute to the 1963 duet album by John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.
Elling had occasionally turned to pop and rock music for material, but his next albums were his biggest steps yet in that direction. The Gate included songs by The Beatles, King Crimson, Joe Jackson, and Stevie Wonder. 1619 Broadway was a tribute to the Brill Building, the New York home of several music publishers, and included songs by classic writing pairs Goffin & King, Mann & Weil, and Bacharach & David.
Elling continued to explore new territory on 2015’s Passion World, which went international with music drawn from Scotland, Cuba, and France, and songs by both Brahms and Björk. The classical-to-pop range continued on his Christmas album, The Beautiful Day, which ran the gamut from Johannes Brahms to Donny Hathaway.
In 2016, Elling went on tour with saxophonist Branford Marsalis and his quartet; they joined forces to record the album Upward Spiral, for which Elling received another Grammy nomination.
Elling’s most recent albums have taken a turn to the philosophical. The Questions features songs of longing for a better world, from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “I Have Dreamed” to Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and Elling draws lyrics from poems by Rumi, Sara Teasdale, and Wallace Stevens. The questioning turns inward on Secrets Are the Best Stories, which finds Elling exploring themes of alienation, isolation, and intimacy.
In addition to his own music, Elling frequently appears as a guest on other artists’ albums. He can be heard on albums by guitarists Lee Ritenour and John Pizzarelli, pianists Harold Mabern and Brad Mehldau, and operatic soprano Renee Fleming.