When an already formidable performer takes another giant leap, the seismic energy runs right through the art they practise. Kurt Elling, the 38-year-old jazz vocalist from Chicago, has been a singer's singer for years. His technique is dazzling, his range of effects immense, his understanding of both the vocal and instrumental jazz tradition deep, and his inventiveness with familiar materials astonishing.
In the past, his only fault as a communicator to wider audiences was that his very infallibility could make him seem remote. All that has now changed. On his current run in London, a renewed repertoire and a new exuberance has been electrifying packed houses.
Elling was accompanied by his regular pianist (and his composing and arranging alter-ego) Laurence Hobgood, bassist Rob Amster and drummer Willie Jones III. An opening My Foolish Heart included an extended passage of ascents, from Sinatra-like mid-range purr to whispered falsetto, while Hobgood sustained a muted, trancelike single-note repeat. The staccato Betty Carter song Tight dived into a skidding uptempo scat sequence (Elling managed to pay tribute to the departed Carter while boldly appropriating the piece in his own way), before Irving Berlin's Astaire-Rogers classic Change Partners (And Dance With Me) offered a typically radical surgery on an evergreen. Elling almost turned the original request of a stylishly light-hearted suitor into a haunting dirge, full of dark, maybe even obsessive cajolings.
Elling cruised on with abstract beatbox and urban percussion sounds (into which Charlie Parker's Moose the Mooche made the first of two interventions in the set), drummer Willie Jones delivered a remarkable mix of hip-hop and free-swing patterns, and April In Paris eventually appeared over an implacable funk beat. Body and Soul, sung to the Dexter Gordon sax variation rather than the original tune, got so close to Dexter's rumbling descents to a bell-note that it seemed as if the singer had actually turned into a sax. Maybe gestures like pointing to his head on the word "headstrong" are a little superfluous, but nobody's perfect - even Kurt Elling.
