Kurt Elling Quotes

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Kurt Elling

Profession : Musician

Birth : November 2, 1967

If you're going to be transparent, you're going to have to let the music come that wants to come.

Kurt Elling

I know how hard it's been for me to get my thing out there.

Kurt Elling

It's easy to get tired of religious fundamentalists. They're such a bore. They have no sense of mystery. It's a drag, man.

Kurt Elling

A lot of people are put off by the idea of scat singing. Either that or it's something to be made fun of.

Kurt Elling

My goal is to be really incredible by the time I'm 70.

Kurt Elling

When improvisation is properly applied, it is compositional thinking, sped way up.

Kurt Elling

I think my intention was there, and my love for the music was apparent. And there are very few singers who get up and desire to take the kinds of risks that jazz musicians routinely need to be taking.

Kurt Elling

You can start from any source material, and you can approach it with a jazz ear, and then it will become a jazz moment.

Kurt Elling

I'm one of the culprits who keeps turning stuff around, shaking up original tunes and trying to stand the canon on its ear. But sometimes, you just need to sing the song.

Kurt Elling

It's true that I'm not known as a crooner or balladeer. I'm known for a more crusading or quixotic temperament.

Kurt Elling

There is an actor's responsibility in presenting the emotional content of the lyrics to an audience. But whether you do that in a straightforward fashion or an ironic fashion or a blase fashion is all about opportunities, and singers are missing opportunities as artists if they don't pay attention to the lyric.

Kurt Elling

There's a wide spectrum of possibilities in how to deliver a song.

Kurt Elling

'Man in the Air' was an experience in exercise.

Kurt Elling

The idea is to be unrestrained by categories.

Kurt Elling

I travel all the time. And as I go around the world, I try to learn a little something and not just take up all the available air.

Kurt Elling

It helps me to learn things in different languages, even if it's just phonetically, and to make myself vulnerable to other audiences by trying to reflect back to them the genius of their own cultures, and to do that, oftentimes, in new jazz settings, new arrangements. It's a way to show respect.

Kurt Elling

Music is a physical expression that has a physical impact upon the listener. Sound travels in waves through the air. This is not abstract. This is scientific fact. And it makes physical contact with the eardrum... and with the heart... and with the rest of the body.

Kurt Elling

My strength is to communicate with an audience and to know what jazz singing is capable of.

Kurt Elling

At a certain point, the graduate school thing didn't work out, and that meant I was liberated.

Kurt Elling

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

Kurt Elling