A dudish hip-meister from Chicago, Kurt Elling blended swing, yarn and song in a highly entertaining, real-deal performance on Friday.
Backed by the tightly-wrought tunes of a seriously in-synch trio, the showman singer did the downtown, finger-clickin' thing with gusto and vim. And on slow standards such as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, his smoochie voice had darkness of the been-there mode and none of the poor-me sentimentality of the crooner.
But there is more to Elling than just that. With canny humour and a bagful of vocal tricks, what he described as the "open-hearted ear" of the audience was all his from early on.
The thoroughbred song guru is a deft wordsmith too. This was especially evident on what was perhaps the night's piece de resistance, a "quasi-autobiographical, quasi-hermeneutical" song-poem of many unexpected twists, titled The Rent Party. Like a George Burns wise-guy tale set to music, it concerned a heady encounter at a soiree with a "smallish girl" of raven hair - "honey on a razor and she knew it too".
Elling is also known to mimic the sax and trumpet with his voice and improvise words and word-sounds to melodies. This difficult art - an exalted incantation which he calls "ranting" - was displayed in strangely compelling renditions of John Coletrane's Resolution and Dexter Gordon's Easy Living, among other pieces.
Here, as always, the support of the trio was crucial. Elling's gifted "collaborator", Laurence Hobgood, is a pianist with the maestro's edge, while double bass man Rob Amster has a melodic and supple approach to the strings. And a curt solo by drummer Michael Raynor had all the tension yet none of the chaos of a swarm of bumble bees in flight.
There were two encores. The only cavil was that even after a two-hour show, it seemed like it was all over too soon. This was music that should go on and on, well into the other side of midnight.
