Quotes from Kurt Elling

I hope that I'm also maturing emotionally as a human being as things go on.

You don't just let a guy drop off the earth and not come together with everybody who knew him and loved him and respected him. You try to do it the right way.

I've tried to learn as much as I can about the great jazz singers to understand what makes them important, vital artists, but there is always something more to learn.

Man, I just feel so fortunate to be a jazz musician at all. I have a hard time thinking of it any other way. It's such a fulfilling vocation. I love it.

The musicians in Chicago gave me my vocation, but New York calls to a jazz musician, for sure. You want to test your mettle.

I've worked with a number of big bands, but there's nothing in life like the Basie band.

I hope to be at the top of my game when I'm 65 or 70. I don't want to reach my peak at 29. Not that I'm holding back anything, but there's a bunch of junk I don't know.

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.

You want to be doing your best work whatever field of the arts you're in because your life's going to be over all too soon, and you have to make the most of it.

People just want to dig; they want to dance. They don't want to work all through the night, and neither do I. I like getting 'out there,' but communication should be occurring on more levels than heavy-laden philosophical.

Karl Johnson, my first piano player at Milt Trenier's, he just swung really hard and gave me a sense of really belonging to the jazz scene.

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

The idea is to be unrestrained by categories.

Chicago is my home. And the way Chicago sounds will always be a part of who I am.

It's a lovely thing to have people in any circumstance appreciate your work.

I consider myself very fortunate. I have a beautiful wife who supports my work and is raising our daughter when I'm out on the road.

Salacious? I suppose every once in a while the salacious thing is not a bad thing. It's kind of monochromatic if that's all you do.

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.

I haven't been afraid of John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Bill Evans or Wayne Shorter or Herbie Hancock. Why would I be afraid of the Beatles?

A lot of the commercial world wants to bank in on the cachet that jazz brings.

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

There's a spiritual complement to any attempt at transposing a commitment to humanity through music or art.

As improvisers, we're acting as composers in front of people.

You learn as much as you can from the people that you work with. That's why you want to surround yourself with the heaviest people that you can possibly get to.