I'm one of the culprits who keeps turning stuff around, shaking up original tunes and trying to stand the canon on its ear. But sometimes, you just need to sing the song.
Interpretation
Creativity involves both experimentation and tradition; sometimes it's necessary to embrace the original.
In this quote, Kurt Elling reflects on the dual nature of artistic expression, where one often feels compelled to innovate and rework existing pieces to create something new. However, he acknowledges that there are moments when it is equally important to honor and simply perform the original creation, highlighting the balance between creativity and respect for tradition in art.
In practice
A musician might use this quote when discussing their approach to covers and remixes at a concert.
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.
That's the thing: There are so many art songs in jazz. It's a much more rich experience for the singer than people think.
I try to stick with things that I can sing with honesty.
One doesn't have to scat to be a jazz singer.
At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
The thing about my music is, there really is no point.
It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.
When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world.
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