Kurt Elling

“I've worked with a number of big bands, but there's nothing in life like the Basie band.”

“Every record is a gate of a certain kind for me.”

“I want to be the jazz singer.”

“I remember seeing Tony Bennett on television. He was the only guy in the orchestra who was wearing a white tux, and I thought, 'That would be good. To be the only man on stage in a white jacket.'”

“Romance is one of the things that most countries share, and I've noticed how different communities have their own ways of singing about love and heartbreak.”

“I don't really have a more intellectualized approach. After the fact, I can sure talk about stuff a lot - but when I make decisions, I really just follow what sounds good to me.”

“I hope that I'm also maturing emotionally as a human being as things go on.”

“I didn't arrive on the scene until after Jaco Pastorius had passed, but 'Three Views of a Secret' is a long-time favourite of mine.”

“It's easy to get tired of religious fundamentalists. They're such a bore. They have no sense of mystery. It's a drag, man.”

“'Man in the Air' was an experience in exercise.”

“At a certain point, the graduate school thing didn't work out, and that meant I was liberated.”

“If I was going to sell out, I would do it for more than 10,000 records.”

“Out in L.A., things relax even further than they do in Chicago. There's such a looseness to it, and there's a potentially refreshing advantage to that.”

“You can never predict what the specific shape of your life is going to be, and you won't really know its general shape until, God willing, you're advanced in years and you have the time and opportunity to look back in a coherent way and see what your life was about.”

“I'd been studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. I hadn't been doing well, because I was sitting in with jazz musicians at night - it's hard to read Heidegger, but it's especially hard if you're half asleep.”

“Audiences have taught me how to sing better and entertain better.”

“I listened to a lot of King Crimson back in the day.”

“My intellect was quickened at divinity school, and my abilities to discern were strengthened, and that's always valuable.”

“Chicago has a burly, action-oriented but still self-assured and relaxed confidence to its stride. The city has a lot of wide-open space and all the possibilities that suggests. There's a lot of horizontal grandeur here.”

“Listening to something without being present is different from being there in the flesh.”