Winner of numerous Vocalist of the Year polls (including the 2007 Down Beat Critics Poll), Elling is as intense and cerebral as he is poetic and engaging, a master of both vocal and literary improvisation. His father was a church musician, and playing instruments and singing was just a natural part of growing up. Although he never formally studied music, young Kurt participated extensively in choral music through high school and college. But it wasn’t until college at Gustavous Adolphous in Minnesota that he was initially turned on to jazz, hearing records of Herbie Hancock, Dexter Gordon, Dave Brubeck and more in his dorm. He performed during his college days, attracting audiences with his scatting which at that time was not very familiar to midwest, small town audiences. Still, he was not really thinking of singing as his career, and headed to the University of Chicago for graduate studies in Divinity. Notes Elling, “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… Graduate school sharpened my mind, my analytic and my writing skills. It gave me the tools to root around in questions of meaning.” 

Citing key influences as Mark Murphy, John Hendricks and Frank Sinatra, Elling is best known for his scat, vocalese, and a variant informally known as “rant.”  Says Elling, “Ranting is an informal term a friend of mine came up with for improvised melodies coupled with improvised lyrics. Sometimes there is no melody - just an improvised story or ‘open thought process.’” Elling describes his first impromptu effort at ranting: “I was doing wedding band things... On these gigs, we'd be in the middle of ‘Isn't it Romantic’ or something like that, and the leader would come up while I was singing and say in my ear, ‘Tell them that they're going to cut the cake now,’ or ‘five minutes to the bouquet toss.’ So instead of stopping singing, I'd just start making up the announcement in song, often trying to rhyme the lyrics and sometimes making up little stories to go with it, singing all the while over the changes.”

Why is Elling special? Because he can hold a note forever and yet it never seems too long nor does it waver off the mark. Because his unique phrasing makes even familiar standards such as “April in Paris” memorable. Because his classical training is never too far removed, even from covers of Horace Silver or John Coltrane. Because his arrangements have shapes as exquisite as their sounds (e.g., Curtis Lundy’s “Orange Blossom”). Because he is the musical equivalent of a gold medal Olympian gymnast, “leaping octaves in a single bound” (Pamela Espeland, Jazz Police), shifting meters as well as dynamics and pitch as if it is all a ball of vocal silly putty. Because he has the ultimate control of his own instrument—his voice, sliding up and down like a melodic slinky toy, splattering rounds of notes like machine gun fire, filling space like a horn soloist.   

Guitar Legend Herb Ellis labeled Nancy King “the greatest living jazz singer.” Arriving in San Francisco from Springfield, OR in the 1960s, she met future husband Sonny King at the Jazz Workshop and joined his band. In addition to performing for the next two years at the Workshop, she worked with Vince Guaraldi, John Handy, Sonny Donaldson, and Flip Nunez in San Francisco, and studied with Jon Hendricks. After moving to Las Vegas and then back to Oregon to raise her sons, King recorded her first album and made some appearances in New York before starting a collaboration with pianist/composer Steve Christofferson, with whom she has performed on the west coast since the 1980s. She released Straight Into Your Heart (Mons, 1997) with Christopherson and the Dutch Metropole Orchestra and appeared with Ray Brown on his Some Of My Best Friends Are Singers (Telarc, 1998), touring with Brown and his trio during the next year. Recent collaborations include performances with Karrin Allyson and Elvis Costello, continued recordings with Steve Christofferson, and an acclaimed MaxJazz release in 2006 featuring duets with Fred Hersch. Notes vocalist Mark Murphy, “Her singing flies between our ears with a certainty of inevitable rightness that is at least... simply thrilling.”  

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s elegant small hall, The Allen Room, features the glittering backdrop of Central Park and the intimate atmosphere of a cozy club. It adds up to the perfect environment for an evening of what might be the most exquisite vocal pairing of the year, Kurt Elling and Nancy King.  

The Kurt Elling Quartet and Nancy King will perform at the Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Columbus Circle in Manhattan (in the Time Warner complex), on February 15-16. Visit www.jalc.org.