JI: It's a long time that the world of jazz male singers needed a new representative. Then, as a miracle, KURT ELLING comes to renew a vocal jazz that was closer and closer to pop music rather than to bop! Did you have the same feeling when you set about the music scene?
K.E.: It would be too much to say that I thought of myself as a "savior" of anything. However, I did, and do, think that there aren't enough true explorers in vocal Jazz. That is doubly so among the men, where the numbers are so much smaller to begin with.

JI: In your opinion, being a singer is a profession or a mission?
K.E.: More a mission -- to have a profession means having a job. To be an artist means sinking your whole live into your work.

JI: To understand that your CDs consist of some original stuff, one has only to read the titles of the songs that you include in your albums, or to notice the authors and the players you work with. What kind of project is behind that, the project to reach such outcome/result?
K.E.: I am a writer, not just a singer. A writer naturally wants and needs to communicate his vision through his work. That cannot be done by covering and recreating Jazz standards alone.

JI: What do you associate with the word "jazz"?
K.E.: The freedom and joy and risk of new music coming into the world via improvisation coupled with a craftman's discipline and a prophet's vision.

JI: What kind of jazz do you like more? Swing, blues, bop…
K.E.: I like some artists from all moments of Jazz's development. I use all of her history to learn and orient myself for the future.

JI: According to you, the music you play would be listened to in a theatre or in a club?
K.E.: Both are appropriate. We are artists but we are also Jazz people.

JI: What kind of music do you listen to?
K.E.: I have wide tastes -- from Johnny Hodges to Wayne Shorter, from Bing Crosby to Babs Gonsales to BETTY CARTER, from Stevie Wonder to King Crimson to Frank Zappa, from Bryn Terfel to Renee Fleming to Maria Callas, from Claude Nugaro to I Muvrini to Celia Cruz to the legendary Fayrouz.

JI: Do you feel as you are taking changes/risks when you conceive any new project?
K.E.: Every recording is full of artistic risks.

JI: Do you think that a mediocre song can reach a good level thanks to good arrangements, or that arrangements can do nothing if a good song is not the basis?
K.E.: I heard that the saying came from Cootie Williams, "The material is immaterial."

JI: Can a mediocre singer be successful through right connections or these former can do nothing if such a singer is not talented?
K.E.: Commercially speaking, yes. This happens quite often.

JI: When you started off, what situation did you find around? Did you have to make any choice? What kind of choices?
K.E.: My Father is a church musician, and all of us were given instruments to play and lessons. I don't remember a time before singing. I am told I was making up parts and harmonies to the hymns in church, but this is probably apocryphal information. But music was always a joy to me, and I did it because it was natural and made me happy.
Then, when I was in college, some cats down the hall were playing Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock, Dave Brubeck, people like that. It was just at the time that I was beginning to actively listen to things -- apart from classical music, which I was quite familiar with by then. It happened that I was able to start sitting in with small groups right just as soon as I started listening intently. Cats were kind, and audiences were always excited by my caterwalling. Very few singers on the scene (this was at Gustavus College in Minnesota) were attempting anything like scatting, so I was bringing a more unique and crowd-pleasing thing to the stand.

JI: Is it important for you that Blue Note produces your work?
K.E.: I am very pleased to have had all of my recordings on Blue Note. It is the world's greatest Jazz label, and this has helped my career enormously.

JI: Who first told that you had a talent for music?
K.E.: I would say accepting a gig playing for the door at "Milt Trenier's", a basement club at Fairbanks & Ohio in Chicago. This was during graduate school, and it meant the beginning of not studying for school & instead boning up on the Jazz life. I did a gig there once a week on-and-off for two years or so, playing for the door & earning anywhere from 0 to 20 dollars a night. I played music with the house pianist, one Karl Johnson, who had led his own all-black USO big band back in the day and was one bad mother. He took me under his wing & showed me in conversation & on the stand what it might mean to be a professional Jazz musician. You can read about Karl further in the context of the second edition of the Guerilla Diaries on my web site (www.kutelling.com). I still bump into Karl every once in a while & am very glad every time I do.

JI: How did you form your musical, vocal and cultural education?
K.E.: I did mostly choral work from grade through graduate school. I never went to music school, and never took many individual lessons for voice. Mostly, I have elaborated and extrapolated from choral work, and learned from recordings, on the stand, and at the occasional Q&A with other musicians. MARK MURPHY laid some important information on me, as has Jon Hendricks. Most things I have absorbed by listening and watching and from hard work on my own.
I wish I had more of that music school information. I'll spend my life trying to catch up there. On the other hand, if I had gone there, and not to a good liberal arts college and not gone on to the University of Chicago for Div. School, I doubt that I would be able to bring to bear the wider philosophical and literary awareness I have into the mix. Many times, students ask me where I get the ideas I do. Well, it's from having had a reasonably diverse and interesting intellectual career. I read a good deal, and try to stay current in the broader conversation. Also, one has to be curious about everything.
I should also specify a bit regarding my graduate studies. I was at the University of Chicago Divinity School reading the Philosophy of Religion, which is a specialized academic category of study which lies somewhere between theology and straight philosophy. I was not there to become a priest but an academic - a professor. That having been said, I was there to try to answer deep level questions of meaning that were gnawing at me. While these questions were not answered ultimately, as many of the most important cannot be until death, I did arrive at some satisfactory working answers.
It does seem to me that graduate school sharpened my mind, my analytic and my writing skills. It gave me the tools to root around in questions of meaning, and to read thick books. It wasn't my niche, ultimately, but it was an experience of deep exploration. It also gave me some big words to throw around. I am proud of the time I spent there, and still sit on the Divinity School's Visiting Committee.
Beyond that, any "influence" the prolonged discussion of metaphysical questions has had on my work is either self-evident in the work itself or is, frankly, irrelevant to public discussion of my current work. As Saul Bellow put it, "[the artist's] inwardness should be, deserves to be a secret about which nobody needs to get excited."

JI: Do you like to listen to your performances?
K.E.: Not as a rule. I need to when we are making a recording for release, for quality control. Performance recordings I archive.

JI: Your worst flaw and your best quality…
K.E.: I am impatient. This is my worst and best quality.

JI: Considering the contemporary jazz scene, Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall, Dee Dee Bridgewater and yourself, do you think now is a good time for jazz? Or rather do you feel music still lacks anything to equal the past greats' success?
K.E.: I think it is a bad time for Jazz in that the mass culture does not support and sustain a lively interest in it. Therefore there is a struggle for work, a struggle to stay new and still please the people, a struggle to keep an art form thriving and alive. This is not the fault of Jazz. There are always new wonders to surpass the old, new artists who are current and looking to the future. Nut they tend to face a greater struggle because the mass culture is told, "the greatest things happened in the past and can never be equaled." Then, to keep working or to be "stars", some artists kneel at this altar, perpetuating the problem and robbing themselves of true greatness. I am not necessarily speaking directly of the people you list. I am speaking of a systemic problem.

JI: What Ella, Betty, Sarah, Billie, Louis had that is not possible to reproduce nowdays?
K.E.: A broad-based mass appeal rooted and supported by a healthy and diverse Jazz base.

JI: Do you think that, after Betty Carter demise, vocal jazz has lost the only one singer who dared to do what she felt to without compromises? Who deserves her heritage?
K.E.: I wouldn't say the only singer who dared, but I would say one of the most daring. She was a great artist. There are always very few great artists.

JI: Do you think it's important for a singer to feel himself/herself the leader of the group where he/she sings?
K.E.: That depends on what kind of vision the singer has. I don't think of Norma Winstone as a bandleader, but she is certainly a good singer and a real contributor to Jazz.

JI: If you would take stock of your career, how do you feel today?
K.E.: Working hard.

JI: During these years, have you reached what you aimed at or not yet?
K.E.: Not yet.

JI: Among the great names you have worked with, who paid you the nicest compliment and who told off you?
K.E.: In the one master class I took with MARK MURPHY, he had everyone in the room get up to sing, one at a time, and had specific and, at times, prolonged suggestions for each. When my time came, he simply said, "My God, he's a Jazz singer. Everybody do it more like Kurt." That's all he had to say. It was very early for me -- I was still in graduate school. I'll always remember that.

JI: Do you think that jazz singing has evolved or do you think it has stuck to a particolar period?
K.E.: Much more stuck than moving into the future -- look at what Wayne Shorter is doing. Then look at what most of the singers are doing. It's a shame.

JI: What do you want to communicate while you sing? As an artist, what goal do you aim at?
K.E.: All of us in the band are of a mind to give the highest quality musical experience we can - to play and so to communicate to the best of our abilities. I want people to be surprised, to be moved, to laugh, to remember something important they may have forgotten. I want them to have what they need.

JI: If you were Minister of Music, three things you liked to do in favour of jazz?
K.E.: Give every child in every school an instrument and a band and a teacher. Use music to teach math, reading and "life skills". Have an hour every day of listening to great music from around the world, with a special focus on the history of Jazz and up to the present.