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.
Interpretation
Jazz incorporates a variety of artistic songs that enhance the singer's experience significantly.
In this quote, Kurt Elling emphasizes the depth and richness of jazz music, particularly highlighting the complex and artistic songs that are often overlooked. He points out that for singers, performing these art songs offers a profoundly enriching experience that goes beyond mere performance, showcasing the unique emotional and creative intricacies found within jazz.
In practice
In a discussion about the depth of musical genres, one might quote Elling to highlight the richness of jazz.
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.
I try to stick with things that I can sing with honesty.
One doesn't have to scat to be a jazz singer.
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.
...and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.
Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.
My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.
They say that to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived
Somewhere along the line a convention developed that the opening of a film was just a laundry list of credits. There was no incentive to complicate an area that was settled.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
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