Kurt Elling’s new one has the potential to push him out of the hermetic world of jazz insiderdom where he has been a big figure now for over a decade. It's produced with the right mixture of restraint and pizzazz by Don Was. Elling has sometimes been seen as the nearest thing to a successor to Frank Sinatra. His inventive ease dancing vocally over the strict metres, his charismatic ability to front a band, not to mention his sharp suits and his love of a killer melody are Sinatraesque.
But like his fellow top American jazzers such as Brad Mehldau and Cassandra Wilson – both also in their forties – there is an introspection and intelligence you never sensed from Frank. Their age partly explains a growing sense that the American songbook is, if not dead, at least on life-support. Now at the top of their game, they were brought up listening to all kinds of music, quite a bit of it English, and that's reflected in the repertoire.As Mehldau has covered Nick Drake and Radiohead, those English upper-middle-class poets, Elling goes Anglo with takes on "Norwegian Wood", Joe Jackson’s "Stepping Out" and even those titans of prog, King Crimson, with the opening track "Matte Kudasai", which reveals itself to have a wonderfully lyrical melody in Elling’s interpretation. There’s also Miles Davis’s (or Bill Evans – depending on who you believe) "Blue on Green" and Stevie Wonder’s slightly cloying "Golden Lady" and a couple of originals including one that references Descartes, in a lyric by Elling. Frank was not given to casual name-dropping of philosophers, to my knowledge.
It’s all very tasteful, thoughtful and hard to fault with immaculate playing. But call me old-fashioned if I wish sometimes Elling would really let his hair down and let rip and activate some lower chakras. At times this album feels like being trapped in a lift with a jazz buff who knows absolutely everything and is determined to let you know it. A bit more sex and decadence and less priestliness, more Saturday night and less Sunday morning, would not go amiss.
Kurt Elling talks about The Gate
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