Kurt Elling
Birdland
Through January 11

“I am the guy who sings pretty good most of the time,” Kurt Elling announced, rather modestly, halfway through his latest show at Birdland, in which he is collaborating with drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. and his big band. 

“This is a reunion,” he also informs us, explaining that “any time a big band gets together, whether the cats have known each other for a hundred years or they’re meeting for the first time, it’s a reunion. We have all fallen in love — at a certain part in our lives — when we have decided to just be broke. I mean there’s a reason that they’re all wearing black suits.” 

There’s a certain irony to this, as big bands many years ago were regarded as the most commercial form of the music. Today they’re viewed as the area of jazz in which it is the most difficult to make any money, mainly because of the sheer economic reality: a 15-piece ensemble in any venue won’t necessarily pull in any more profits than a trio or a quartet. 

Mr. Elling’s show is also a reunion in the sense that, as he says, “we haven’t been here at Birdland in quite a while.”  My earliest memory of Mr. Elling is his Birdland debut; it was in 1996, right after the current 44th Street Birdland first opened, and he was launching his first Blue Note Records album, “Close Your Eyes.” He has played there consistently over the last 30 years, and it is the home base for Mr. Elling’s most experimental music. In 2022, say, he performed a semi-sung, semi-spoken series of semi-improvised poetic rantings and ravings in a way that was uniquely compelling.

The current offering at Birdland, conversely, features Mr. Elling at his most accessible, in a format that is among the most venerated in jazz or pop — that of a swinging singer with a full-scale big band. This one features such well-known New York players as trumpeter Benny Benack III, trombonist Mike Dease, pianist Luther Allison, and the veteran drummer-bandleader, Ulysses Owens Jr.

Yet the program is hardly a concession to commercialism: Rather than consisting of well-known popular songs that all of us older fans know by heart, the main program’s music is mostly by cutting edge jazz composers of the 1970s and has never before been taken up by other singers: Thad Jones’s “Forever Lasting,” Jaco Pastorius’s “Three Views of A Secret,” and Joe Zawinal’s “A Remark You Made,” among others — all necessitating new lyrics by Mr. Elling specifically for this purpose. 

Mr. Elling opened with Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out,” a fun and frivolous hit from the English superstar’s 1982 album “Night and Day.” Although Mr. Jackson has occasionally performed jazz and American pop standards, Mr. Elling is among the very few to take one of his pop songs and repurpose it for jazz. He sang “Steppin’ Out” on his 2010 album “The Gate,” but herewith makes it into something bigger and more universal, not to mention more swinging, with the full big band. 

The surprising thing is that putting it into swingtime somehow makes it more profoundly philosophical. Our hero is not only “steppin’ out” in the Irving Berlin/Fred Astaire sense — i.e., to go dancing — but taking a decisive step “away from the darkness” and “into the light.” 

A new lyric to Joe Zawinal’s “A Remark You Made” serves as a preview of a forthcoming project devoted to the music of Weather Report, thus taking its place alongside another WR standard lyricised and sung by Mr. Elling, “Three Views of a Secret.”  

This superband of the 1970s is regarded as the flagship ensemble of the movement known as jazz-rock fusion. Yet though we tend of think of that music as being as loud and in your face — as it ought to be when rock music and jazz are fused together — these two pieces, “Secret” and “Remark,” are among the most moving and poignant ballads in Mr. Elling’s repertoire. “Remark” is further enhanced by a lovely lyrical soprano saxophone solo.

The final piece in the main set, John Scofield’s “Jeep on 35” — from the guitarist’s 1998 “John Scofield a Go Go” — is a funky riff that opens with Mr. Elling not exactly scatting but exchanging highly rhythmical non-verbal grunts with Mr. Owens’s drums in a way that spits the difference between James Brown and Sammy Davis Jr. 

Once the rhythm is established, the melody and harmony form the meat on those underlying bones as the rest of the ensemble comes in, with Mr. Elling singing a lyric by Nina Clark in an arrangement by Jim McNeely. That eventually gives way to a baritone saxophone solo by Jason Marshall and then a thunderous percussion passage by the leader. 

Mr. Elling departed the stage an hour after starting, which left us hungry for more. He returned to satisfy our appetites with dessert: a stunning arrangement by Mike Abene of the Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn Academy Award winner, “All The Way.” 

Taking the lyrics literally, Mr. Elling, joined by trumpeter Benny Benack III, proceeded to explore every nuance, every melodic nook, and every harmonic cranny of this Sinatra standard. Surely, it’s a treat to hear something we all know and love, even if Mr. Elling has already proven he can move us with an original or a song we’ve never heard before. 

He also projected a note of guarded optimism for the new year, telling the audience, “What we’re experiencing during these times, at this hour, and right at this moment of this hour, is that these are the good old days! Right now! We are going to make the most of them.”