StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Catching up with Kurt Elling

Today, let's take a look at some videos featuring singer Kurt Elling, who's coming to town to perform starting next Wednesday, March 13 through Sunday, March 17 at Jazz St. Louis.

Widely acclaimed as one of the top male vocalists in jazz, Elling by now should be no stranger to St. Louis audiences, having performed here a number of times in recent years, most recently in 2017 with saxophonist Branford Marsalis' quartet at the Bistro. For this visit, he arrives just after the world premiere of The Big Blind, a live radio drama/musical staged for the first time last week at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater.

Inspired by Elling's own experiences performing at Chicago’s famed Green Mill, the real-life story of comedian Joe E. Lewis, and elements of the 1957 Frank Sinatra film The Joker Is Wild, The Big Blind was devised by Elling, writer Phil Galdston and director Terry Kinney, and tells the story of a 1950s nightclub singer confronting career and romantic conundrums.

In addition to Elling in the starring role, the production features a 23-piece big band led by drummer Ulysses Owens Jr., with a Foley artist performing sound effects on stage, and additional speaking/singing roles for Dee Dee Bridgewater, Broadway veteran Ben Vereen, and UK singer/actor Ian Shaw.

While Elling hopes to tour with The Big Blind in the near future, next week in St. Louis, audiences likely will hear a good portion of material from his most recent studio recording, 2018's The Questions.

This week's videos shows him performing songs from that album, starting up above with his version of Carla Bley's "Lawns," given a lyric and recast by Elling as "Endless Lawns." The clip was shot in October of last year at a venue called De Doelen in Rotterdam, Netherlands, with a band include Adonis Rose (drums), Clark Sommers (bass), Jim Watson (piano), and John McLean (guitar).

After the jump, you can see four segments of Elling's performance in April 2018 at La Seine Musicale in Paris, just as The Questions was released, with a band including McLean on guitar, Stuart Mindeman on keyboards, Clark Sommers on bass, and Jeff "Tain" Watts on drums.

The first clip shows Elling opening the show with his version of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Next, it's "A Happy Thought," penned by Mindeman with a text from poet Franz Wright, paired with a version of "I Have Dreamed," written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for the Broadway musical The King and I.

That's followed by "Washing of the Water," a Peter Gabriel composition, and then Elling's reworking of Jaco Pastorius' "Three Views of A Secret" as "A Secret in Three Views." The final video is a promotional clip of Elling singing Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” which several critics have cited as one of the album's highlights.

For more about Kurt Elling and The Questions, see his 2018 interview with Jazz Times magazine,  his interview with the Australian magazine Limelight from last year's tour "down under," and this December 2018 feature from Elling's hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...