At the close of the last blog, I said that next time up I hoped to provide the results of an interview with Kurt Elling at this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival. That outing came about. We chatted about Beat Generation writers over breakfast at the Hyatt, and then went outside for a forty-five minute interview, the results of which were so rich I’d like to present them in two parts rather than just one (as I’d originally planned). Before the "official" interview, we’d been talking about Kenneth Rexroth, the Beat Generation "paterfamilias" whose poetry has had an influence on both Kurt and myself — so we started there...

Kurt Elling: You mentioned the breadth of his interests and his abilities, such as teaching himself to be able to translate Japanese. We talked a bit about his awareness of the destruction that human beings at that time were waging on the earth, and his reverence and his humility before nature comes through in so many of his poems. It’s striking to me how successfully and organically he was able — in the same poem — to refer to the splendors of the earth and refer to the quick passage of time, and how small we are in comparison to the earth, and a sense of reverence and romance: real romance, the romance of sentient beings and not just people walking around who are brain dead, but real sentient beings. That’s what makes his poems diamonds. It’s because there’s so much refraction of light and intelligence and desire all compacted.

It’s amazing, and not an easy thing to do.

Yeah! I have real respect for his abilities. It’s the kind of thing that I strive for, to even be aware of walking around, let alone to have the kind of poetic gifts to be able to articulate them to other people in such a way that would be meaningful.

I mentioned a 2002 Cadence magazine interview in which, referring to Beat Generation writers, Kurt had spoken of their "dark side," and the paradox that they were "some pretty self-satisfied, self-righteous cats, who were trying to tell everybody what to do, in their attempt to have everybody stop telling them what to do."

"I loved that," I said, and he laughed. I then asked how, born in 1967 as he was, he’d ever got into what the Cadence interviewer called "Beat texts."

You know it’s tough to trace an exact lineage. I know that hearing Mark Murphy’s records, when he did the "Bop for Kerouac" and he did the readings, those were very special records and I know that that pointed me to actually picking up the books if I hadn’t yet. Maybe a better way of saying it is: it gave me access to the books. And once you start down the path, then if you find something captivating, you want to encompass as much of it as you can. So that intent grew pretty naturally, and not only from an intellectual concern or curiosity, but also because some of the things that Kerouac and Ginsberg were going after, I have a strong... well, Kerouac opens my heart a little bit because he’s so... he’s just so sincere.

In the Cadence interview, you said that the part that interested you the most was "the transcendental aspect... the yearning for the eternal" and "the love that he had for people."

Yeah, he’s so vulnerable, he’s so sincere, he’s trying so hard and he’s such a goof. He’s so fragile, yet at the same time he’s really reaching out to what it means to be alive while he’s alive, and to glorify through his work as a writer just his life, his experiences and his friends’: the trials and tribulations and the victories of just being alive in that moment, in that era. And it’s his sincerity and his earnestness that was his greatest strength, but it was also his greatest vulnerability. I’m sure it’s what put him in the ground. Ideally what you have is an ego that has a flexible protective armor and when you write and when you consider and when you love, there is no armor and you are completely open and your consciousness receives and speaks with perfect unguarded honesty, but the world is an unforgiving place, and for somebody who can’t get their armor up when you need armor, you’re going to get crushed beneath the wheel, and it certainly came to him in a way — you know, fame — everything that went down.

It seems to me he was never the kind of character that had any desire whatsoever to thrive in that public environment. He had desire, but it was the desire of a child who didn’t know he was playing with fire, so...

I mentioned that my wife Betty and I had lived in Greece for a year and I was astounded when I heard university students coming home from the discos at night, singing "pop" songs composed by the great composer Mikis Theodarakis, with lyrics by Nobel Prize in Literature recipients Georgos Seferis and Odysseus Elitis, and I thought, This could never happen in America: this blend of outstanding music and first-rate poetry, not just standard song lyrics. "But you’re making that happen," I said to Kurt, and asked about the risk involved.

It didn’t seem risky to me. It just seemed... What’s the right entrance for this? The possibility inherent in communicating as a singer, as a speaker in the jazz milieu is very broad at the outset: the number of avenues that you have just because you’re a singer and you speak in language and you sing with language. You can sing a standard, you can swing a standard, you can rearrange a standard, you can juxtapose a standard with another standard, you can scat — that’s just the baseline; but if one has studied the history of jazz singers: there’s Mark Murphy and his spoken word stuff; Sheila Jordan, the way she’s gone about things; Jon Hendricks and the way he makes a presentation and is so erudite and tells all these marvelous stories; Betty Carter and the intense and far-reaching scope of her just straight up musicianship and improvisational ability — and then like me, if you’re not just interested in the music, if you’re interested in an entire root system of the jazz culture we have, much of which grows out of the 1950s and 60s and the time that you are obviously more hugely familiar with...

It’s impossible for me to have lived in that era, but because part of my job is to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the history of the sound, and because the influence of the poets and the painters and the sculptors and the politicians and the arguments of the times were so much of a piece with the way the musicians were playing and gave them a spur to keep exploring, to find new ways — "Oh, we’re going to the moon," or "Oh, we’re in danger; Cuba’s got missiles," whatever it was — the fears and the energies and the aspirations of the urban life of America at that time was so tumultuous and trembling and expanding and obliterating the past and re-creating it, and that’s all in the best parts of the music that jazz was responding to and jazz was commanding, leading the way, hearing before the people heard how tumultuous it was going to be and playing it and shocking them with the news...

I’ve been given a peculiar set of gifts. I’ve been given a voice that resonates and can move people. And I’ve got an intellect that’s interested in things beyond just the music. And I’ve been given opportunities to learn from some intensely intellectually very gifted people and to cop what I can cop, to understand what I can understand, and to know that there is a glorious possibility in every moment. If I was just quiet enough and writer enough, every breath is a poem and every situation you are in — painful, beautiful, ugly — it's just all poetry, all the time. You just have to be available to it.

Somewhere else you talked about "the daily discipline that it takes to see the world with fresh eyes and to try to apprehend everything that’s coming to you as a potential gift: there’s poetry in that."

Yeah, so the [Beat Generation] books moved me, the books informed me, yet it was not just out of a kind of intellectual curiosity. It’s because I really want to know. My questions are the ultimate questions. There’s a reason I was in graduate school for three years, reading Haberman and Schleiermacher.

Of the latter, theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, Mark Schorer (in "William Blake: The Politics of Vision") has written that poet Blake "argued like Schleiermacher that religious intuition lifted the believer into a higher sphere, provided him with an enriched perception of the wholeness of experience," and provided "an aesthetic experience of harmony that is potential in the world... a truly imaginative moral act, in which selfish isolation of human needs is transcended in the sense of a larger unity and a nobler universe" — all of which fits into Elling’s own aesthetic and sense of purpose very well.

I was going to ask you about the possible influence of your church background. The psalms. The love of language. The love of those sounds.

A love of language, a love of sounds — an understanding of the emotional impact that a ritual environment can bring, and the importance that music plays in that ritual environment. That ritual environment has definitely informed the way that I approach a given concert. I want to take people right out of their seats right from jump if I can and alert them that something is going to happen to them beyond "Take the 'A' Train." Then I try to take them there, or go with them, whatever the right way to say it is. And I think this is part of the task, the calling that I’ve been given. This is who I am. These are the roots I come from.

I guess my first experience of music at all was in a theological environment: music in the service of the emotional and spiritual growth of a group of people — and that’s not something that I have any desire to leave behind, just because I’m in a different genre now. But I’m not the only one. There’s a whole history of jazz musicians: Brubeck has written sacred concerts, Ellington has written sacred concerts, Mingus was no stranger to spiritual aspiration; Trane obviously, Art Blakey — Why did he call his band the Jazz Messengers? Right?

I’m OK with fitting into that tradition as well. I try not to speak this explicitly about it, or I don’t speak this explicitly when I’m on the stage. And I usually don’t even speak about it this explicitly when I’m specifically being asked about it. I don’t want to lead with that. I want to lead with the music, lead with the joy, lead with the swinging experience, lead with the kick, and then when everybody’s relaxed and happy and they’re grooving, then you’ve already done 90% of your work; and then any specific message... only it isn’t a specific message other than something I think Kerouac would have identified with: we’re here, and it’s not about money or winning... it’s just about souls having a good time.

The Japanese call it "kono-mama," or suchness — living the moment, the here and now.

Yeah!

In the liner notes to your "The Messenger" CD, you said, "I am not ‘The Messenger'," but writer Neil Tesser added that your union of words and music "creates something provocative and yet serene; it leaves no doubt that the singer has quite a bit on his mind." He said your message "grows from the intersection of jazz and poetry, the place where the beat meets the Beats." You’ve also said, with regard to Kenneth Rexroth’s poems about impermanence: "love-time is brief." Is that the message, if there is one?

You know it’s tough for me, because I do feel like I have a mission or a calling. I feel like I’m doing the thing that I’m here to do. But I don’t feel comfortable and never really have... I don’t have a specific theological agenda, other than peacefulness and joy. There’s a reason I’m not an actual priest. I don’t want to prescribe how it’s supposed to go for people. I just want to help them remember what it feels like sometimes.

"I learn by going where I have to go" [a line from Theodore Roethke’s poem "The Waking," which Elling recites/sings to Rob Amster’s bass accompaniment on his "Nightmoves" CD].

Yeah. I just want to help them remember what it feels like to be at peace and to be happy. One of the psychological definitions of happiness is self-forgetting, where you are no longer aware of yourself, because every time you are aware of yourself, then you have desire. Every time you are aware of yourself you have "Oh, my back hurts" or "I’ve got to do this job" or "What’s on TV?" or "I want to buy that." Or "I’m hungry" or "Look at that girl" or whatever. And the times when we are actually at peace and are happy, we’re not thinking about any of those things. We’ve been able to let all of those thoughts go and to simply be. Which is a Zen moment. It’s satori [enlightenment].

Music is one of the primary ways that regular people experience this, without even knowing it. The music starts and they listen, and if the music connects with them, and if the performance is emotionally resonant, then for ninety minutes, they forget themselves and they are totally in the moment. They are experiencing a period of time in which they have no concerns, no doubts, no worries, no fears, no desires other than to continue having this experience. So that’s why I say there isn’t really a message. A message?

It’s the experience that you are providing for people and then, if in the course of that I can take them to a place where they’re like, "Wow, what’s he singing? Huh!" But I don’t want to take them any further than that, because then they start to follow their thoughts again. If I structure my set the right way, they’d follow my thoughts. And I’ll divert them through any experience that, at the end, they have joy and they have light and they’re happy that we were there—and then they want to come back for more. And then, from a French sense, if I’m really doing my job, then the surest proof that I’m a real artist is that, when the show is over, they all go out and have drinks together and have conversations that last into the night. That would be great!

This is the first half of the Monterey Jazz Festival interview I held with Kurt Elling, and I would — as I said at the start — like to save the second half for the next blog, so that you may have the interview in its entirety. The last half will give you the results of what we discussed regarding "rants" and prepared pieces, hipness and being typecast, multi-disciplinary art, and large projects Kurt Elling has completed, plus one "in the works." Again, stay tuned.