Kurt Elling is the epitome of Wayne Shorter’s definition of jazz – “I Dare You.” Elling could have easily settled into his Grammy-winning crooner mode for his 2010 Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane. Instead, he kept searching and won another Grammy for his highly creative avant vocal project Secrets Are the Best Stories, with pianist Danilo Perez in 2020. A year later he took another major turn with SuperBlue, an album of funk, insistent beats, and contemporary lyrics under the auspices of producer-guitarist Charlie Hunter and two musicians more often associated with hip-hop: drummer Corey Fonville, and bassist-keyboardist DJ Harrison (both of Butcher Brown). That risky experiment resulted in a Grammy nomination and now we have its successor, Iridescent Spree. In the interim, Superblue also issued the covers EP Guilty Pleasures earlier this year.
While Elling has long proved his mettle at bebop, pop, progressive jazz, and even neo-soul, until the 2021 release, he had never been heard in this context. He even sings through a vocoder on some tracks. This, like its predecessor, is a beats-fueled record, meshing Elling’s superb scatting and vocalese with unrelenting funk. Featuring originals, reinventions, and rather startling covers, the album begins with hip reading of Joni Mitchell’s never heard this way “Black Crow” infused with Fonville’s hip-hop beats and Pinderhughes’ flute.
The funky “Freeman Square” has the album title in one of its verses as Elling’s unique sense of rhythm keeps his vocal moving in synth with Fonville’s beats, improvising and name-dropping toward the latter part of the tune, after which the horns enter. They inventively interpret Bob Dorough’s Schoolhouse Rock standard “Naughty Number Nine” with Elling playfully giving us a math lesson as the horns swell behind him. “Little Fairy Carpenter,” riding Harrison’s bass, is smoother, playing more to Elling’s crooning side and thereby lacking the effusive energy of the first three. Of course, there’s an immediate rebound in the filthy funk of “Bounce It,” another terrific feature for the punchy horns and Fonville’s insistent beats.
In most simple terms, the SuperBlue concept is a repackaging of jazz to an audience that may not be familiar with the art form’s storied history and nuances. Case in point is the Elling/Hunter reinvention of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” with their own “Only the Lonely Woman,” a ballad turned on its head with hip-hop beats and spacey electronics underneath Elling’s drifting vocal. “Right About Now” is in a similar vein as “Little Fairy Carpenter” while the Elling original and single “Not Here/Not Now” reignites their trademark earthy, funk-infested hip-hop, horn-blasted attack. Elling reverts to spoken word on the closing “The Afterlife,” evoking the jazz beat poets ‘word jazz’ of the late ‘50s such as Ken Nordine.
Elling has, aside from his many awards, proved creatively restless. He seems to think this project has many more legs. SuperBlue seems to suit him just fine, maybe even a little better in its second edition.