On Kurt Elling's Live in Chicago CD, recorded in his home town last summer, there's a stunningly fresh and original interpretation of My Foolish Heart. It's a simple, sentimental ballad, much neglected by jazz musicians until the late, great pianist Bill Evans revealed its lyrical possibilities. Three-time Grammy-nominated Elling's approach, wrapping his rich, warm baritone round the words, is more muscular than Evans's, combining a visceral tenderness with a sense of mystery that probes beneath the song's simplicity to find something deeper - darker, even - and more moving.
How he does it is a virtual summation of his art. He uses subtle, surprising and invariably musical alterations of the melody; his phrasing is amazingly flexible, stretching and compressing lines with equal facility; and though handling the material with such freedom, he never loses sight of the words or their potential to suggest more.
And that's underlined by a masterful stroke - the interpolation of a mystic poem by St John of the Cross into the performance, radically shifting its emotional scenery while somehow preserving its unity. Elling sings the poem against a background of frozen harmonic movement, supported only by bass and drums. By the time he brings back the original song it's clear he has made both ballad and poem his own and changed the perception of both in the process.
He couldn't carry off a tour de force like that if he didn't profoundly relate to the disparate sources of the material. In conversation, the courteous and affable Elling seems as comfortable speaking of his literary interests - among them the one-time communist and finally Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, and those other voyagers of the spiritual, the Beats, notably novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and poet Allen Ginsberg - as he is talking about his musical inspirations. These include jazz singers such as Mark Murphy, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker and "vocalese" exponents Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks, who practise the difficult art of setting words to improvised jazz solos and then singing them note-perfect. Try it - it'll give your tongue a hernia.
Elling's background is redolent of all this, from singing in church to studies at the University of Chicago's Divinity School and Gustavus Adolphus College in St Peter, Minnesota. It was there that he opened his ears fully to jazz and players such as pianists Dave Brubeck and Herbie Hancock, and the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.
And to literary spirits like Merton. "I went to graduate school," he says, "and read the philosophy of religion, and that was one step in a much longer exploration of theological themes and philosophical ideas. My father's a church musician and for me there have always been two broad disciplines - the theological and the musical - and Thomas Merton was one in a long journey of exploration that is ongoing, but not to the same degree. Now I explore the music quite a bit more."
As that suggests, Elling does it in a way that is simultaneously rooted and adventurous.
Being a singer who is well-versed in literature also presents him with a dual opportunity - greater access to material and the fact that, while the written word can have a flow and sense of cadence, spoken or sung it can gain a resonance well beyond the rhythms of the text.
"That's true," he acknowledges. "It's not surprising to me that Keroauc was the first of the Beats with whom I came in contact, because he really wanted to be considered a jazz writer." He didn't connect with Kerouac's written words at first, and it wasn't until he heard Mark Murphy interpreting them, and recordings of Kerouac reading, that he realised Kerouac's compassion, the rhythms of his language and what he called "the flow of his subconscious mind".
"And certainly of all the Beats he was the one who came closest to the rhythms and intentions of jazz writing. I think that Burroughs absolutely was through and through a surrealist and Ginsberg was leaning a lot more in that direction, although with much more an agenda of social upheaval."
He is not, Elling adds, "an unreserved cheerleader for the Beats", but he feels some brilliant work came out of the movement. "I'm thinking of Howl" - Ginsberg's anguished, angry cry against the crushing norms of American society. "I'm also thinking about some more gentle works, like the Sunflower Sutra, which we'll be presenting. I think in Kerouac's case, not only On The Road, but also The Dharma Bums, is really a beautifully humanistic, I want to say, affirmation."
One of Elling's own affirmations is his ability to improvise fresh lyrics and melodies in performance. He calls it "ranting", a thoroughly inappropriate word for a sophisticated procedure and an artist as articulate as he is.
"Well," he laughs, "when I first started doing it, it was a much less gentle and dignified effort. It had a lot more to do with being a bachelor too long and having lots of stuff pent-up that needed to be," he adds with a hint of irony, "cathartically explored. And actually it was a friend of mine who was at one of the occasions when I was just going off on the evils and dangers of television and how it's on everywhere, who came up to me afterwards and said: `What's so great about that? You're just ranting. You're just completely open, you know, disembowelling yourself right in front of everybody'!"
Nowadays it could no longer be mistaken for verbal hari kiri. Nor could it be taken for stream-of-consciousness surrealism, although there are the merest hints, occasionally, of the surreal in his work.
"But I think that comes from the perspective of a jazz musician," he responds, "and so much of jazz exploration is an exploration of juxtaposition, of surprises and of that which hasn't been attempted before. And I think there's an element of jazz that is always going to be challenging, and it's important to me to be a jazz musician. Even when I'm a writer it's still, I hope to say, so much a part of what I do that it comes through clearly." The juxtaposition of My Foolish Heart and St John of the Cross is a perfect example.
It's also a near-perfect illustration of something that Will Friedwald - probably the finest writer in the English-speaking world on singers in general and jazz singers in particular - recently wrote: "Elling's art is ultimately about worship." And there is an undeniably spiritual element running through his work.
"Well, I hope so," Elling says. "I just want to bring to people the best possible thing, and we, in the States anyway, are in a position of having forgotten so much of what has made human beings strong in the past. I mean, we're very strong in terms of personal freedoms now, thanks in large part to the work of Ginsberg and Burroughs, but there's a spiritual element that has been diluted because we have no single religious identity. The great, incredible human experiment of America has led to a position where people have really forgotten their spiritual underpinnings.
"And so we go through these banal days with the tremendous institution of capitalism pressing us on all sides, sort of commanding us to purchase things in order to redeem our identities and tell us who we are. It's just incredibly destructive.
"And, in a way, you cannot be a jazz player of profundity and not have a spiritual connection, because the music is itself a spiritual connection. And it's my intention to be true to the calling that I feel I've been given, and the gift I've been given with the power of my voice and whatever power of words that I have - it's important to me to be a servant of that and to bring the best that I can to people." "And, in a way, you cannot be a jazz player of profundity and not have a spiritual connection, because the music is itself a spiritual connection. And it's my intention to be true to the calling that I feel I've been given, and the gift I've been given with the power of my voice and whatever power of words that I have - it's important to me to be a servant of that and to bring the best that I can to people."
Helping him to do just that in Galway, where he will be part of Traffic, a tribute to the Beats, will be actors John Mahoney and Tim Hopper from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, along with his regular working trio. At Dublin's Vicar Street next Friday it will be just himself and the trio, the group which makes the Live In Chicago album work so well; pianist Laurence Hobgood - "a magnificent talent", he says, with some justification, of the man with whom he has an almost telepathic understanding - bassist Rob Amster and drummer Michael Raynor. The toddlin' town's temporary loss is our - temporary - gain.
Kurt Elling performs in a tribute to the Beats at the Galway Arts Festival on July 19th and plays in Dublin on July 21st as part of the ESB/Note Productions concert series at Vicar Street