This blog consists of a continuation, and the conclusion, of the interview I held with Kurt Elling at this year's Monterey Jazz Festival. We left off talking about "the Message" in his music (or the music as message enough in itself) and continued talking about the difference between what Kurt had at one time called his "rants" and his "monologues" or pieces consciously composed or prepared, "worked out in advance." I'd found a quote in the liner notes to his CD "The Messenger" in which he said he found the former, the "rants," more "rewarding." Still true?
Kurt Elling: Well, I'm married now [laughs, openly]. Ranting is something a monk can do. Again, you really have to have enough solitude for these things to gestate, and to have enough of a solid kernel of something so that when you begin it explodes and you don't know where it's going to go. So the carefully constructed things tend to be something that I do more often now. But I'm still, with Mark Murphy or Sheila Jordan or getting with Von Freeman, any of these teacher figures of mine... they can kick me back into that space pretty quickly, if they just give me a look, and hook, and then I've got to be like, 'OK, gantlet's down, let's go.'
Me: The challenge is on. I found a review of a concert you gave in Michigan, and a reviewer for the Kalamazoo Gazette wrote that you were "thoroughly hip and groovy, this reincarnated poet from the Beat Generation — he said 'man' and 'cat' a lot and spoke with a great many flowery witticisms." The reviewer also said you "charmed the audience, which included several people celebrating Mother's Day." But the slang term "Beat" goes all the way back to 1860 and the Civil War, and the notion of hipness (I was "raised" on Slim Gaillard and Mezz Mezzrow's book "Really the Blues") had been around for some time before the Beat Generation. How do you feel about being typecast as 'thoroughly hip and groovy'?
It's par for the course. They're going to write about what they've going to write about. Spice that people don't think exists anymore, or that it's just in books or people's memories... or even the guys that lived it don't talk like that anymore.
I mentioned young MFA creative writing candidates I met at a writers conference in Gettysburg who, when I talked about living in San Francisco in 1958, said, "You were a Beatnik! To us that was the Golden Age!"... even when I said I was not fully aware, at the time, that I was a "Beatnik," and that we were dirt poor to boot and it was no "Golden Age."
Yeah, it's all the Golden Age, and none of it's the Golden Age. You know, frankly, musicians on the jazz scene in Chicago, certainly the people I was hanging out with, well, I gravitated toward the older musicians because I wanted jazz father figures, and I wanted to have their blessing and their encouragement and their love and their acceptance. I wanted to touch the past through them, and that's how they talk! [laughs] So I wanted to be like them. It's a little bit like what Cary Grant said: he became Cary Grant by pretending to be him long enough so that he did! He became him! So, now it's just part of the thing, and I think it's cool. It's become an organic part of me, and even here at the Festival, I'm not the only one, man. Talk to Joe Lovano for a couple of minutes. Some of us just want to be a part of that. We want to continue to manifest that energy, because it's good to be a slick, you know? It's chic! It's not ordinary.
I quoted something I'd cited in my second blog on Kurt, a portion, in "code," of Mezzrow's "Really the Blues" (for which Mezzrow even provides a glossary, and a translation, at the back of his book): "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... 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."
I told Kurt that, as I kid, these words became embedded in my head (and are still there, indelible), even before I learned the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence.
[Laughing] There you go!
Let's talk about "diversified experience" or what you've described as "multi-disciplinary art events," full-blown performance pieces that encompass poetry, spoken word, dance and theater. I've been fascinated by the possibility of that sort of thing for a long time, and you've done so handsomely with it. An Italian reviewer praised you as "immensely versatile," commenting on the fact that you "keep changing from one moment to the next," charming audiences with a traditional ballad, then scat-singing, "commanding [your] voice as an instrument, acting while singing," etc. Yet I grew up in an era of "specialization," when, if you tried to do many things, people thought you probably did not do any one of them very well.
I had a year when I ended up in an anthology of best American short stories (with Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates), was exhibiting woodcut prints in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Smithsonian Institution, and was playing keyboards with a folk-rock group called the Salty Dogs. But I had to fight to convince people that all of this "stuff" was coming from one source: my own soul! I was also teaching at a state university in Wisconsin and when the question of tenure came up, my chairperson called me into his office and, looking straight into my eyes, asked, "Bill, what is it you really do?"
That was the thinking of the time, the era, but today, things have changed, and "multi-tasking" seems to be in.
Well, again, if as an individual artist you could do anything from ranting to soliloquy to vocalese to straight up extemporaneous communication, I think that one already probably has a natural consciousness that is syncretic, one that wants to pull things together and see how they combine. The most interesting thing is not to try to combine everything with everything; it's to combine this interesting thing with this very disparate interesting thing, and to have a new viewpoint on everything else because you never would have thought of those two things together.
So when the commissions started, who am I to say no? I gave it my best shot. They were always on a shoestring budget and they were only meant to run one or two nights at a time, but I'd give it my best shot because it was just a great creative challenge to try to figure out how these things would work together. I'm really proud of the results. I feel like I have a good organic sense of the way that dance and music and spoken word would go together, especially if I'm familiar enough with the choreographer's work. Because a lot of times, if I'm seeing someone who has a great choreographic gift, and insight, that every often inspires stories in me, so I'm adapting my thing to something that goes with this. It's that kind of call and response, if you will.
Is the "Encounter Without Prejudice: An Open Tribute to Allen Ginsberg" project on film?
No, it's not really on film. There are audio recordings of it, and I'm actually having to have friends of mine back in Chicago dig through the Steppenwolf Theatre archives and the radio archives because it was pre-digital and just never had the budget... well, it's not like "let's set up two digital cameras and have done with it." The reason I'm having to go through and get that stuff happening now anyway is that I'm applying for a grant for a new piece and they all want proof that you've actually done the things that you've said you are capable of doing [laughs].
Can you talk about the new piece, or does discussing it beforehand jinx it?
I've had an idea that for a few years has been gestating. It will be somewhat autobiographical, but it will also be based on Joe E. Lewis and "The Jokers Wild": just using that as a very basic skeleton, but doing it in a very contemporary context and in that way sort of embracing history, because I have all these deep parallel experiences to Joe E. Lewis. The Green Mill was the club he was working in when they [mobsters] cut his throat. I know the tunnels. I know the ghosts of that place, and that it's still a functioning club and it still has all this energy and it's living. I'm not that interested in the old-time gangster thing. That seems real corny to me, and I want to present contemporary music as a heavy part of this, so we're talking about a contemporary setting of an artistic tragedy — one that features a live and semi-spontaneous score.
Will it work that way: as a legit "Greek" tragedy, hubris, denouement and all?
I'm working on the form. I'm not sure how its going to end, whether he pulls himself out or what the thing is, but I'm sure you can well imagine what an intensely mental game... well, I don't know if "mental game" is the right way to put it, but it's something for me to contemplate: his life and the lives of people who have an artistic gift in a very special frequency and for whatever reason have that gift taken away from them. And then, what do you do with the rest of your time? If you can't have your work in the Smithsonian and play music... if you don't have a diversity where you've got back up things, then what?
When people ask me if I ever get "writer's block," I say,"No, I just go someplace else," which is a fortunate option, I think.
Yeah! I think this kind of idea goes to not only the questions that would specifically haunt us, but questions of regeneration, questions of self. The choice of one's identity, and the creation of identity. I want to say that's an American thing. It's not just that of an individual artist. This is not just a genre-wide phenomenon. Here are all these musicians who are creating themselves by creating music. They've done discipline, they've learned history; they've learned about music and now they are declaring themselves. And that's an American thing.
I gave a talk on Charlie Parker the night before the Festival started, and I tried to show that he was not a prodigy like Mozart —that his was a slow, steady acquisition of skill.
Yeah! A thirteen hours a day sort of thing.
I felt it was important to show that he was not just some idiot savant playing this music in spite of himself!
Right! Right!
I said I'd only take up about a half hour of your time, and we've gone over that, but I would like to ask you about a couple of major projects you've been a part of. Fred Hersch's "Leaves of Grass" CD for one, which I feel did not get the full attention that it merited or deserved. How did that project come about?
Fred Hersch approached me. He was probably 95% done writing the piece. He very beautifully let me know that he had written it with my voice in mind, and he really wanted me, personally, to sing it. He had my voice in his mind throughout the process, which I think is very humbling and it definitely touched me at the time and even now when I think of it, because it is such a great piece of work.
He came to my house in Chicago (he was there doing a gig someplace) and he stayed over at my house a couple of nights and we played through it on my piano, and then I got to work and he started setting up dates. It was really his project. I'm thrilled to be the voice of that piece — and I think of Ginsberg saying "We haven't really even arrived there yet; what I want to see is some young beautiful boy just dancing and singing the poetry; it's not enough just to write it and even to speak it. If I could sing better I would. That's why, because poetry needs to sing!" And sure I get to sing Whitman, the greatest of American poets, the father of us all.
I couldn't help but add, and perhaps she's the "mother" of us all: "There was this lady named Emily Dickinson."
Well, Whitman did it all, man.
Did you and Fred Hersch work out the parts that would be spoken not sung, together?
It was his gig. It was just for me to interpret it. He's the genius behind all that.
Obert Davis sent me his recent Chicago Jazz Philharmonic recording Collective Creativity, which is excellent. He played trumpet and flugel on "The Messenger" and you did a "Collaboration of Genius" concert with him and Reginald Robinson in 2006. Were you accompanied by all "more than fifty" members of that orchestra?
The whole orchestra, yeah. It [a "K.E. Medley"] was an expanded thing. You can see a lot of the cuts on YouTube. There are five or six cuts, video cuts, with the Sydney Symphony: some of the same charts we did with Obert and then some expanded things.
So Obert Davis took what Laurence Hobgood had arranged for you and…
In some cases he took stuff that we had just done on the ["Nightmoves"] recording and then he extended them for the full orchestra. I don't remember all of the parts. That was a while ago.
He wrote that your friendship went back to… a gig at a House of Correction?
That's true. That is true. You know they do those gigs where you go into schools and such? You play for 45 minutes and you talk about the music. They had booked us into Cook County, and so we went in and played a gig.
Kurt Elling and I closed out our exceptionally rich and rewarding conversation (one in which I felt we'd found some solid common ground) talking about the Monterey Jazz Festival: the times he'd performed there and his year as Artist in Residence ("Talk about multi-tasking!" I said).
They've been very kind to me here. [Festival Director] Tim Jackson's a good friend and I'm really touched to have some real relationships here and to feel like they like me. It's nice.
I mentioned how much I had enjoyed his performance with the Monterey All-Star group, which will be on tour in the forthcoming year. I said I saw him and Kenny Barron — whom I'd seen and heard at the Festival with Stan Getz — and Regina Carter and Russell Malone, and thought, "My God, Look who's up there!"
Yeah, it's a lovely gig. And that was just the first part. Tim put that together. We all basically got in the same room and had potluck. Each of us has a couple of things we knew we wanted to do, and I sort of guided the conversation a little bit in terms of set list: "Hey, do we need this?" It can be a little awkward. My first priority in a situation like that is to defer to Kenny, ‘cause it's Kenny Barron! And if he comes out and says, "Okay guys, now let's work on this, " I'll say… (and here Kurt made a quick sound signifying solid approval).
There you go.
But it's one of those things where nobody wants to… you know, you want to step off on the right foot and start out as friends, and being friends means you're a company of equals, so you have to negotiate the process of putting a set list together in a very different way, and doing the rehearsals and what not, so it was a good start. It was a good start and by the end of the tour, we're going to have something.
I've heard bassist Kiyoshi Kitakawa before, but I was not all that familiar with the drummer, Jonathan Blake. He's a monster — incredible!
Yeah, he really played it!
Any last thoughts?
Power to the people!
Thanks for your time.
Oh man, it's nice. It's nice to have a conversation about this stuff. And I appreciate your welcoming my efforts from my generation to connect.
In the final installment of "Kurt Elling, the Beat Generation, and the Monterey Jazz Festival: An Appreciation and Memoir," I'd like to offer a summary on the music of the man himself, with emphasis on his skillful handling of ballads, and a bit more on his "Beat" roots and the act of combining poetry and music. See you then.
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