Kurt Elling is one of the more expansive, inclusive, flexible jazz artists I've ever run across. I want to stick to my guns and continue to focus here on his connection to the Beat Generation, but first I would like to pay homage to what's been said, and written (and what he's said himself) about that versatility, his wide range of musical activity ("A man of enough parts to be a faculty unto himself"): activity made up of consummate showmanship ("continually taking chances and coming up with fresh approaches"); a solid work ethic ("nonstop weekend for him at the Monterey Jazz Festival"); creativity (from himself: "The daily discipline it takes to see the world with fresh eyes and to try to approach everything that's coming to you as a potential gift, there's poetry in that"); experiment with vocalese ("a chance-taking improviser who often makes up lyrics as he goes along"); his having been a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School ("Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands... and come before his presence with a song;" well, Kurt didn’t write that: that's Psalm 100, but he has said, "Jazz had the Spirit from its birth. Gospel music is in its genes"); the importance to him of the birth of his daughter, Luiza ("The baby is the big thing... a new outlook; everything that came before was valuable training for what will come next"); faith in himself ("It just doesn't hurt like it did before... I used to be revved up, having something to prove... Now, it's more like I believe in what I do"); and the ability to think "big": being involved in projects such as the splendid Fred Hersch settings for Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a concert with Orbert Davis' Chicago Jazz Philharmonic (more about this later), and his recent John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman tribute "Dedicated to You" CD with Ernie Watts and the ETHEL String Quartet.
The first time I heard Elling at the Monterey Jazz Festival, I was present when he came off stage after a set in Dizzy's Den (fortunately, with a Press Pass, I can sit on the floor near the bandstand, my back against a wall, and take it all in). He was nattily dressed (very hip threads or dry goods!), and carting "a ton of attitude" (as someone else has written). He even seemed pissed off when he came off stage (over something that had gone wrong during the set? The sort of thing perfectionist performers are aware of, not the audience?), or else he was just pumped, like a boxer who's won a unanimous decision after fifteen rounds of work. I thought, "Hmmm, another Sinatra? Right down to temperament?" (Kurt himself has commented on this influence: "People think of me as outre, bizarre. Yet Frank is one of the guys that I spent a lot of time checking out and learning from.").
Elling can be intense, but the next time I got near him was at an IAJE conference in Long Beach, and my Jazz Journalists Association buddies Dan Ouellette and Stu Brinin and I ended up drinking with not just Kurt, but Kitty Margolis (and her husband Monty), Karrin Allyson, Jenna Maminna and Nancy King (I thought, "Wow, I'm sitting here drinking with five of the finest jazz vocalists in the universe at large, at least as we know it!"). In this setting, Kurt was decidedly relaxed.
The next time I saw him was when he served as Artist-in-Residence at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2006. He gave a performance at an intimate downtown venue called Monterey Live, and my wife Betty and I sat just a few feet away from him as he sang: the setting reminding me of small clubs I used to play in myself in New York in the mid-Fifties: cozy and compatible. After the show, I had a short conversation with him. He was open, cordial, witty — a "good guy," accessible (a thing sometimes rare in top performers). Last year, Kurt showed up at our MJF Sunday Jazz Journalists Association brunch, walked right up, jauntily, and said, "I'm hobnobbing with the fourth estate."
A former Monterey High School guitar player, Brice Albert (winner of the Monterey Jazz Festival award for "Most Outstanding" musician, part of the MJF Youth Jazz Ensemble and MJF County All-Star Band, now studying at Cal State-Northridge) has good things to say about Elling's accessibility when he served as Artist-in-Residence. Albert found Elling "very direct," "punctual," and down-to-earth regarding the way a singer (or any jazz artist) should "carry" him or herself. Like all first-rate teachers, Elling addressed everyone present, seemed to come from a "large place," was capable of seeing "jazz music as a whole," and willing to take a good hard look (attention to details also!) at just what makes a genuine artist such as Dexter Gordon or Charles Mingus "great." Elling spoke of being able to "construct a good solo from many good sources," of remaining open, resilient, "fluid" when it came to improvising.
One more note on Elling's range before I turn attention back to Beat Generation "roots" or influence. The "Beats" were not often noted for this (Kenneth Rexroth’s unintentional comic severely serious "Thou Shalt Not Kill"; in another poem, he writes, "I take/myself too seriously"), but Elling has a sense of humor. One of the finest (funest) moments of last year's Monterey Jazz Festival, I felt, came when Jamie Cullum joined Kurt on stage in Dizzy's Den, for one of the Festival's last (Sunday night) sets. I was sitting stageside, in the dark, back against the wall, digging Kurt, Ernie Watts, and the Laurence Hobgood Trio, when a very small person (who would turn out to have a large voice and huge heart) sat down next to me. When Elling sang "Say It (Over and Over Again)," this person began to sing to himself, softly but slightly off pitch (so I wasn't sure it was Cullum, even though I'd heard a rumor that he might appear). It was Cullum, however, and next thing I knew he was up on stage, very much on pitch, and the two vocalists exchanged classic playful banter — much of it related to "size." When Cullum spoke of a woman claiming someone was "tall, dark, and handsome," Kurt said, "I don't believe she was talking of you."
Jamie Cullum: "I have a very high opinion of myself."
Kurt Elling: "That's not something visible to the naked eye."
Cullum: "Small things come with big packages."
It was a joyous, earthy exchange, filled with camaraderie — respect and love. When I left, Jamie Cullum was standing alone backstage and I said, "You two guys were great!" He smiled and said, "Thanks."
Back to the "Beats" and their particular aesthetic. Up until the time my wife Betty and I arrived in "The City" in 1958, the only "literature" I’d read regarding jazz was either liner notes on LPs (as described in the My First Drum Set blog offerings) or largely academic works such as Barry Ulanov's "A History of Jazz in America" (a work which stands up surprising well). I dug Mezz Mezzrow's loose "Really the Blues" (with its glossary so you could translate the hip talk: "Well tell a green man somethin', Jack. I know they’re briny 'cause they dug me with a brace of browns the other fish-black, coppin' a squat in my boy's rubber, and we sold out. They been raisin' sand ever since... all I got left is a roach no longer than a pretty chick's memory. I'm gonna breeze to my personal snatchpad and switch my dry goods while they're out on the turf, and thanks for pullin' my coat, ole man." If anyone requires a translation, I'll supply it next blog, ya dig?), but it was difficult to rely upon "Really the Blues" as "history" — legend or myth perhaps; Robert Graves defined mythology as "the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true."
Not long after we'd settled in San Francisco, on my first visit to City Lights (the universal navel of North Beach, along with Vesuvio bar, next door), I saw Allen Ginsburg, Peter Orlovsky, and I believe it was Gary Snyder emerge and hop in their O-honest-to-God Volkswagen bus (I think it was white, but I could be wrong) and take off for — where? The Sierras, perhaps. In the bookstore that day, in the basement, I discovered the Evergreen Review's "San Francisco Scene" issue — and bought it for $1.00 (the going price of the day)! It featured an open letter (and a poem) by Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Dog" (which Bob Dorough would make fine music of: the first piece combining jazz and poetry that, to my mind, really worked well — too often, otherwise, the practitioners of these two separate "genres" just didn’t seem to be truly listening to one another!), Henry Miller's "Big Sur and the Good Life," Jack Kerouac's "October in the Railroad Earth," Ginsberg's "Howl," poems by Brother Antoninus, Michael McClure, Snyder, Phillip Whalen, and Jack Spicer, who, for his wit, knowledge, and unlimited imagination, would become my favorite of these writers — although finding the original Stinson Beach Enkidu Surrogate publication of his brilliant "Billy the Kid," I didn't have the necessary cash — probably $2 at the time — to buy it, and to this day I kick myself for that lapse!
But what really threw me for a loop was reading Ralph J. Gleason describing the San Francisco jazz scene. Here, at last, was writing that matched the music — was truly worthy of it, was as vital and engaging as jazz itself! The piece began:San Francisco has always been a good-time town. For periods it has been a wide-open town. And no matter how tight they close the lid and no matter the 2 A.M. closing mandatory in California, it is still a pretty wide-open town.
A high-price call girl, flush from the Republican convention and an automobile dealers conclave and happily looking forward to the influx of 20,000 doctors, 8,000 furniture dealers and divers other convention delegates, put it simply. "San Francisco is the town where everyone comes to ball, baby," she said.
This spirit of abandon goes hand in hand with a liking for jazz, because jazz is, no matter how serious you get about it, romantic music by and for romantics. What could be a better place for it to flourish than a town where everybody comes to ball, baby? Wow! You could DO that?! You could write that freely, that openly, that wildly, that intimately, personally, that much like jazz when writing about this serious art form — what some writers would later call (not all that accurately perhaps; Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, and William Grant Still, yes, but jazz in and of itself?) "America’s Classical Music"? I was thrilled by what Gleason was doing — his overall approach. I'm not sure enthusiasts, ardent "fans" but non-musicians such as Ginsburg and Kerouac understood the full nature of jazz, its complexity and demands beyond "freedom," but they liked the stuff well enough and formed aesthetic theories regarding "spontaneous bop prosody" which they applied to their own work. In his "Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey," William Least Heat Moon (a fine writer himself), says, "I was eighteen when 'On the Road' came out," and goes on to mention Beat literature as work "my teachers considered worthless it not trash" [remember Truman Capote saying, "That's not writing, that's typing"?].
Moon wrote, "To the teenage brain, of course, there is no higher commendation," but goes on to say that his "sense of language was then too innocent and uninformed... to see the undigested ideas and hurried assemblage in so much Beat writing," and if he did see "an occasional solecism rife in Kerouac's novels), I defended it as proof of spontaneous creation — a howling artistic challenge to the rigidities and conformities dulling the '50s."
Which Beat writing was. I remember what now seems a somewhat ridiculous Civil War between "closed form" and "open form," "cooked" and "uncooked," "clothed" and "naked," "traditional" and "post-modern," "establishment" and "underground," "academic" and "free," "formalistic" and "organic," "inherited" and "forward-looking" poetry.
Moon adds, "I would argue half-heartedly that the Beats were important for what they said rather than how they said it" — but he divests readers of the illusion that Kerouac spent a mere nineteen days painting words, a la Jackson Pollack, on his endless roll of "Teletype": "If only we'd known the truth: Kerouac worked at the book for more than a decade and executed several drafts of 'On the Road,' both short ones and long, including a version in French. The more notorious Kerouac's four manuscript scrolls became, the more fables about them increased."
In this manner, perhaps, "angel headed hipsters" are born. I am hoping that, in the next installment of this blog, I can pass along Elling’s opinions and feelings about "spontaneous bop prosody" and other related matters, by way of a conversation with him at this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival. Once again, stay tuned.
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