One of the world’s leading jazz singers, Kurt Elling joins the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra at Elgin Town Hall on Thursday 26 September.
The concert is part of Findhorn Bay Arts Festival and is the first of a four-date tour of Scotland by Elling and the SNJO.
An established friend of the SNJO, Chicago-born Elling has links with Scotland that predate his lasting association with the orchestra. As a divinity student in the late 1980s he spent a year on secondment to Edinburgh University where friends introduced him to jazz by playing him records and taking him to concerts at the Queen’s Hall.
At one of these concerts he heard saxophonist and SNJO founder and artistic director Tommy Smith, with whom he now enjoys a strong friendship and working relationship.
“We’ve played quite a few concerts together in Scotland now and I’ve seen quite a bit of the country but we’ve never played in Elgin before,” says Elling. “So I’m looking forward to making the trip north, seeing more of Scotland’s beautiful landscape and singing in Elgin Town Hall with this great orchestra.”
Elling and Smith have chosen music by some of the greatest and most popular songwriters and composers of the past seventy years for this latest collaboration.
Big band classics by Duke Ellington and Count Basie, show tunes by Rodgers & Hart are represented, as are pop songs by the Police and Joe Jackson, whose 1982 transatlantic hit, Steppin’ Out gives these concerts their name.
“Kurt Elling is a phenomenon,” says Tommy Smith. “Since 2012 he has worked with us on a series of captivating and diverse programmes. From honouring the legendary Frank Sinatra to crafting the seasonal spiritual experience of Spirit of Light and delving into profound philosophical themes in works such as Apparition Bridge and Syntopicon, Kurt’s artistic vision knows no bounds.”
Recognition for Elling’s talents has been plentiful. In the US he has won two Grammy Awards, having been nominated sixteen times, and he topped the prestigious Downbeat magazine Critics Poll on fourteen consecutive occasions from 2000 to 2013, subsequently adding to this success. He has also won three Prix du Jazz Vocal in France, two German Echo Awards, two Dutch Edison Awards and the International Jazz Artist of the Year title at the Jazz FM Awards.
“As well as putting his own stamp on established songs including, in these concerts, Come Fly with Me and You Are Too Beautiful, Kurt has written definitive lyrics for tunes by jazz masters including saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist-composer Carla Bley and the revolutionary bassist Jaco Pastorius,” says Smith. “We’re pleased to be presenting vibrant arrangements of these songs with him as part of Findhorn Bay Arts Festival.”