Kurt Elling had never met the members of Butcher Brown before he stepped on stage with two of them — producer/keyboardist Devonne Harris (a.k.a. DJ Harrison) and drummer Corey Fonville — in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, in late June. Though he’d known and worked sporadically with guitarist Charlie Hunter over a span of more
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Elling sent Hunter to Richmond with only a few requests. He wanted to revisit “Endless Lawns,” his lyric written to Carla Bley’s “Lawns,” which he’d originally recorded on 2018’s landmark album The Questions. He also suggested Wayne Shorter’s “Aung San Suu Kyi,” the band’s take on which becomes “Where To Find It” with the addition of Elling’s new lyric and the interpolation of a poem by Chase Twichell.
Beyond that, Hunter, Fonville and Harris were largely left to their own devices. “We got ideas from Kurt about what key ranges he liked and that sort of thing,” Hunter explains. “But then we were just like, ‘Fuck it, we are who we are, let’s just play what we play.’ The three of us could probably improvise that kind of stuff all night.”
The fact that the tracks they were laying down would become songs with lyrics once Elling got his hands on them couldn’t help but shape the music in some ways. But according to the trio, it didn’t impinge much once they got rolling. “On top of trying to fit into Charlie’s and Corey’s spaces, I also had to leave space for the vocals to have room to breathe,” Harris says. “But Charlie was steering the ship. And he just wanted to walk in and see where we could take this thing. He really left the energy open to all of us to try to find the vibe and if it feels good, let’s pursue it.”
There was also a generational divide to bridge, though Fonville indicates that Hunter was the intermediary between Butcher Brown and Elling in that regard in much the same way that he was in more practical matters. “Charlie’s older than us — he’s not a peer — but we speak the same language and we view music pretty much the same way. We don’t like to stress. We want to have fun. It’s all about making it feel good first. What was most important with Kurt was to not have him try to change who he is. We weren’t trying to make him sound young, like the guy’s having a midlife crisis. But he’s so deep into who he is, that wasn’t the vibe.”
Elling not only wrote new lyrics to fit with the music that Hunter and the Butcher Brown bandmates crafted, but discovered novel ways to fit pre-existing material to their infectious grooves. One piece, he found, was a perfect fit for The Manhattan Transfer’s Sarah Vaughan tribute, “Sassy,” which comes in for a Headhunters-style reimagining. Another piece wasn’t well suited for lyrics but became the bed for a spoken-word reading of Tom Waits’ surreal carny narrative, “Circus.”
With the subtraction of the space between the two words, “SuperBlue” turns the title track from Freddie Hubbard’s 1978 classic into a hipster stream of consciousness, a psychedelic excursion into “mental tissue” and the “psychic undersea.” In approaching Shorter’s “Aung San Suu Kyi,” Elling opted to ignore the composition’s original inspiration, as the Burmese leader was no longer quite the inspiring figure she’d been when the piece was written in 1997. Instead, the singer decided to celebrate Shorter’s own position as a spiritual leader.
“The guy’s a Bodhisattva,” Elling declares. “The messages that he’s broadcasting in his melodies and in his solo spaces are very profound. So I asked myself, ‘What’s the Bodhisattva got to say? Where are you going to find enlightenment?’ Well, you’re going to find it everywhere. You find it in confusion, you find it in chaos. You just trip over it. So I was able to write a lyric about that and then used Chase Twichell’s poem like a crosscut that reveals even more of the message that’s perhaps a little more inscrutable in what I’ve written.”
In essence, SuperBlue is a singular melding of its creators’ respective sensibilities, a fascinating patchwork that likely only exists because of the unique circumstances of its birth. Would Butcher Brown ever have commingled with the Steely Dan and Kerouac inspirations of Dharma Bums without crossing paths with Hunter and Elling? Would the singer’s optimism have found expression in the Earth Wind & Fire-like harmonies of “Manic Panic Epiphanic” without the taut grooves laid down by the band? Who else but Elling would draw the line between the blistering funk of the tune that became “Circus” and the stream-of-consciousness eccentricities of Tom Waits and Ken Nordine?
“I continue to like my older dead guys,” Elling admits, “the influences that are in my subconscious that come from the jazz world. But now there’s a way for me to push that stuff into something that sounds hyper current, which is what Charlie and the Butcher Brown guys are playing.”
“I was really only familiar with Kurt as a legendary vocalist in the jazz world,” Harris says. “Recording this album was a ‘pinch me, I’m dreaming’ moment, but it’s refreshing to hear him in this different vibe. It pushed my limits, but I think Kurt would say it also pushed him into someplace different than he’s used to.”
In some ways, SuperBlue serves as a mirror-image companion piece to Elling’s previous release, the Grammy-winning Secrets Are the Best Stories. A collaboration with pianist Danilo Pérez, the album confronted the harsh realities of the Trump era head-on. Pieces like “Song of the Rio Grande,” with a new Elling lyric set to Pérez’s “Across the Crystal Sea,” seethed with barely contained anger as they railed against the country’s economic and social divides, concluding, “America, you’ve lost your mind.”
SuperBlue doesn’t shy away from those issues, or the travails of a year lost to a badly mishandled pandemic response. But in keeping with the music’s spirited funk sound, the approach is far more lighthearted. Musically and thematically, SuperBlue offers a refreshingly hopeful and humorous twist on its predecessor’s ideas.
“I’m looking for a jolt of hope from the music I want to hear coming out of this pandemic,” Elling explains. “‘Man, the news is frightening, but everything is cool.’ That’s an important message to have. We’ve all lived through this thing — not just the pandemic, but the summer of protests and the recognition, at last, among a larger amount of our current population of the pain that minorities have been suffering for centuries in America. I tried to grapple with the angrier or uglier elements on [Secrets Are the Best Stories]. I didn’t want to do that again. I needed to be more hopeful and I needed to get my head out of that space and enjoy myself a little bit.”
Compare, for example, the song “Stays” from Secrets with the new album’s “Can’t Make It With Your Brain.” Both deal with misjudged appearances and surprise discoveries upon making a stranger’s acquaintance. But “Stays” — a lyric penned to the music of Wayne Shorter’s “Go” — is somber and reflective. In it, Elling describes a (fictional) neighbor in his apartment building who seems to hide behind his door each time Elling comes home. It’s only after a fire forces them onto the street and into each other’s company that it’s revealed that Elling resembles the SS soldier who’d taken the man’s family away during World War II.
“Can’t Make It With Your Brain” is something else entirely, a hilarious take on our current Body Snatchers reality, when any co-worker or family member might suddenly be revealed as a conspiracy nut whose politics fail to align with our own, to say the least. The song takes theform of a dance-floor banger with a wry Mose Allison twist, as the singer’s eyes lock on a sexy young woman from across the room. The hook-up turns bad, however, when her pick-up line involves being a QAnon supporter. “That was a challenge to figure out,” Elling says with a chuckle. “Like, can I really get away with this?”
Such personal challenges, stretching to discover what more he can achieve with his artistry, feels central to Elling’s music, whether he plants his tongue in his cheek or not. It’s certainly why he’s chosen such distinctive collaborators, each one of whom has their own well-defined identity to contend with — not only Pérez and Hunter, but also Branford Marsalis, with whom he’s worked on two albums: Marsalis’ quartet release Upward Spiral and his own The Questions, for which the saxophonist served as producer.
“I feel like that’s always been part and parcel of what it is,” Elling says. “It’s kind of like you’re making dinner and everybody brings something to the table. As the guy who’s incredibly fortunate to be in the driver’s seat, it’s up to me to figure out what we make out of this stuff.”
At least since The Questions, it seems that Elling’s recipes involve deep, searching explorations of issues both profoundly personal and sweepingly global. He hasn’t forsaken that approach on SuperBlue, he’s simply chanced upon a way to make it incredibly funky and a hell of a lot of fun.
“I wanted to point toward the other side of the coin,” Elling says. “We’re still here for another day, so we have another opportunity to make things right. We have another chance to show compassion and to keep on stepping toward the highest good. We have another chance to make more music. So let’s do that.” - Shaun Brady
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