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I hadn't even wanted to go.
It was March 17—St. Patrick's Day, 2006. Kurt Elling, a jazz singer, was playing at the Strathmore Center, a resplendent new $100–million concert hall near my house in Maryland. I didn't know much about Elling. And to be honest, I didn't care. Still, it was between Kurt Elling and a Law & Order rerun (I don't drink, which makes St. Paddy's a bit dull).
Elling, 38, calm, neatly groomed, began the show with a couple of standards, backed by his ace band: Laurence Hobgood on piano, Rob Amster on bass, and Willie Jones III on drums. Then Elling launched into "My Foolish Heart":
The night is like a lovely tune
Beware my foolish heart
How white the ever–constant moon
Take care my foolish heart
There's a line between love and fascination
It's hard to see on an evening such as this
All expertly delivered. Halfway through the song, the band drifted into one of those breaks that jazz bands do, where everyone gets a chance to play a little solo. Then Hobgood's piano drifted off, and all that was left was the low throb of the bass and drums. Elling began to sing in his five–octave baritone:
One dark night
Fired with love's urgent longings
Clothed in sheer grace
I went out unseen
My house being all now still
On that night
In secret for no one saw me
With no other light that the one that burned in my heart
This guided me more surely than the light of noon
To where she waited for me
It was St. John of the Cross. Elling was commingling "My Foolish Heart" with a 16th–century Christian mystic.I felt a sparkler ride up my spine.
The band was barely playing, hardly even rising above silence. Elling was singing. I found myself lost in rapture. The late great Jesuit priest Paul Quay once wrote that the point of sex was to elevate oneself and another to the love of God, and Elling was treating his audience as a lover. And finding and succeeding with a lover entails risk, fear, commitment, a covenant. This wasn't going to be a night of rickety standards and nice comfortable swing. Kurt Elling was going to do what jazz so seldom does anymore: he was going to take a chance, lay himself bare on the stage.
Elling reached the end of St. John, and the band roared back to the finale of "My Foolish Heart." This was one of the most staggeringly brilliant explorations of John Paul II's Theology of the Body I had ever witnessed. In ten minutes Elling made the point that John Paul the Great made in 500 pages: our bodily love is an icon of the love of God. St. John venturing out in "the mystic night" for God was following the same path trod by the speaker in "My Foolish Heart."
I wasn't surprised to learn after the concert that Kurt Elling is a former divinity student from Chicago. I immediately went out and bought all of his albums. The best, in my view, is Live in Chicago. It has that version of "My Foolish Heart," but every track is outstanding. It's one of those albums, like Sgt. Pepper's, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme or the Beach Boys Pet Sounds, that seems to grow larger rather than smaller with repeated listening. When Elling does standards he often plays with them, adding interludes, letting his voice play with the scales, adding humor—and all without losing the core of the melody. He sings the blues with exuberance and wit, and also does pop, covering Sting's "Oh My God." One particular stunner among gems is "Esperanto." Elling sings about not knowing—"when I die, where does time go?" Then, at the end, he looks at the world and, in a repetitive chant, declares all things great and small holy. Breathtaking.
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