Review: Kurt Elling at Jazz at the Bistro

One of the great things about multi-night club engagements, once standard in the jazz business but now comparatively rare, is that they allow listeners to consider many different facets of a particular artist's work in an intimate setting and a relatively short amount of time. If you're lucky enough (and have sufficient funds) to see the same band more than once in a particular week, you may hear different interpretations of a specific piece as it evolves from performance to performance, or even entirely different material as the players dig deeper into their repertoire to keep things fresh.

The individual nights of a run each tend to have their own character, too. Opening nights can be chock full of nervous energy, but also present challenges for a band getting used to the room, the audience and a host of other unfamiliar variables. Closing nights have their own vibe, too, though it may range from a joyful, all-stops-out romp to happiness tinged with melancholy, like a going away party.

On the nights in between, every band has its own strategy for building and sustaining momentum, and for their second set at Jazz at the Bistro on Thursday, May 11, Kurt Elling and the Laurence Hobgood Trio walked right down the line between cutting loose and holding back.

Now, this statement is not meant to suggest that Elling shortchanged his listeners. Far from it - he brought focus, concentration and commitment to each number, and the audience responded enthusiastically. But all singers must guard their instruments to one degree or another, and Elling's art form is particularly demanding, as the human voice operates in a fundamentally different way than, say, a tenor saxophone.

It's fascinating and impressive to hear and watch Elling sing his own lyrics set to a convoluted Dexter Gordon solo, following just about every nuance of the tenor man's recorded performance. And though he does a pretty good job of being nonchalant about the difficulty of such a feat, the fact is that it is difficult. So, anyone with a knowledge of how hard it is to sing this sort of stuff ought not to object to the fact that - with three shows down and four yet to go this week - on this Thursday, Elling gave his musicians plenty of room to stretch out.

Fortunately, it's a very high quality group. Hobgood has worked with Elling for years, and their rapport is fundamental to the band's sound. He's a technically impressive pianist with a keen sensitivity to the sort of dynamics needed to accompany a singer, though occasionally, his influences will pop up in undigested form - Thursday's opening trio number was very much in the spirit and style of Bill Evans - to those who say "ripoff," I say "homage" - while in a later number, Hobgood's solo pivoted from obviously Hancockian octave trills and harmonically displaced scale runs to some Tyneresque fourths and speedy arpeggios.

That said, overall, he's a really tasteful player, and he did one particularly cool thing on Thursday that you don't often hear jazz pianists do: During a solo by bassist Rob Amster, Hobgood worked his way down the keyboard as Amster worked his way up the neck of his bass, eventually providing a walking left-hand bassline for a few bars of Amster's high-register soloing. It was a small thing, tossed off in passing, but indicative of Hobgood's imagination in the moment and how well these musicians work together. Drummer Willie Jones III, a recent addition to the group, proved to be a capable timekeeper with, again, that sense of dynamics that is so important when playing behind a singer, and his solos elicited shouts of approval from the audience. Overall, the sound quality was very good in the quieter passages; however, though Elling was clearly audible throughout, the drums tended to overshadow the piano a bit in the louder sections.

Elling ran almost the entire vocal jazz gamut all in one song on an extended version of "Winelight," crooning his way through the verses in a very smooth-dog, ladies' man sort of mode, then giving the band members plenty of room to blow before breaking it down for an extended interlude of unaccompanied scat singing. To the uninitiated, scat singing may sound like not much more a bunch of nonsense syllables, but elite practitioners like Elling can construct their solos just like an instrumentalist, using rhythmic, melodic and harmonic resources to tell a story that builds to a satisfying ending.

This was a highlight of the set, as was Ellling's interpretation of "I Like The Sunrise," a rarely-heard Duke Ellington tune fitted with another original lyric. The physical limitations imposed by a multi-night engagement notwithstanding, Kurt Elling is definitely an uncompromising jazz artist, the sort who both demands and rewards serious attention.

(Edited slightly after posting for clarity and to add links.Edited again to fix a typo.)