Jazz singer Kurt Elling’s latest CD, Nightmoves, features a set of songs all about a moon-kissed lifestyle. But ever since his daughter was born a year and a half ago, the seven-time Grammy nominee sees nighttime from a whole new perspective. “I used to be a night person,” he laughs. “I’m a different kind of night person now.”
Elling, a 39-year-old Chicago native skilled in finger-snappin’ swing and sultry torch ballads, says his records come together naturally. Nightmoves, for example, was “two-thirds finished” before he and his bandmates realized they were making a concept album. It was just a matter of combining night-themed originals with compatible covers, like “In the Wee Small Hours” and “I Like the Sunrise”. “If I can’t put my own thing on it, then there’s no reason for me to touch it,” he says. “I start with an idea, just to toy with it. I don’t think, This is a good tune – I wonder what I can do with it. It’s more like, Man, I gotta do something with that.”
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This article appears in Jun 13-19, 2007.